JS Mill Revisited: Biographical and Political Explorations

J.S. Mill Revisited

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J.S. Mill Revisited Biographical and Political Explorations Bruce L. Kinzer

J.S. MILL REVISITED

Copyright © Bruce L. Kinzer, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8068–7 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8068–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kinzer, Bruce L., 1948– J.S. Mill revisited : biographical and political explorations / Bruce L. Kinzer. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1–4039–8068–3 (alk. paper) 1. Mill, John Stuart, 1806–1873. 2. Political scientists—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Philosophers—England—Biography. I. Title. JC223.M66K56 2007 320.092—dc22

[B] 2007009018

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First Edition: October 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Deborah, Anna, Amanda, Jon, Kian, and Lara

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction

1

One

The Father, the Son, and the Manly Spirit

8

Two

Gathering Truths, 1826–30

Three Mill and Harriet Taylor: The Early Years Four

43 77

Mystifying the Mystic: Mill and Carlyle in the 1830s

112

Five

Mill and the Secret Ballot

146

Six

Mill and the Problem of Party

164

Seven

Mill and the Experience of Political Engagement

179

Notes

205

Index

232

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of three of the chapters in this book appeared in print under the following titles and in the following places: “J.S. Mill and the Secret Ballot,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 5 (1978): 19–39; “J.S. Mill and the Problem of Party,” Journal of British Studies 21 (1981): 106–22; “John Stuart Mill and the Experience of Political Engagement,” in A Cultivated Mind: Essays on J.S. Mill Presented to John M. Robson, edited by Michael Laine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 182–214. I am grateful to the editors, journals, and publishers concerned for permission to reprint these items in a revised form. I am also grateful to the University of Toronto Press for allowing me to quote liberally from the great Toronto edition of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (1963–91). Mill scholars everywhere owe an enormous debt to John M. Robson, the general editor of the Collected Works, and none can possibly owe more than I. The chapter on Mill and Carlyle could not have been written without use of the superb Duke University Press edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (general editor, Charles Richard Sanders). For permission to quote extensively from this edition, I wish to thank Duke University Press. I am also grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to quote at some length from The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, edited by Jo Ellen Jacobs (1998). I want to express my appreciation to the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, for allowing me to quote from the diary of Henry Cole, material reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum. One person especially, my friend Jeff Lipkes, had a close association with the four biographical chapters in this book. He read each with great care and offered much penetrating criticism (along with words of comfort). I am grateful for the use to which he applied his acute intellect and impressive knowledge of Mill, and more grateful for his friendship.

Acknowledgments

ix

Martin Sheppard also read early versions of these chapters, and provided excellent editorial advice. I asked my wife, Deborah Kinzer, to read a draft introduction to this book, and her astute comments produced changes in tone that I can now see were sorely needed. William McCulloh and Patricia McCulloh kindly agreed to read the piece on Mill and Carlyle, and their observations gave rise to a number of improvements. I thank them. As I do my dear friend Ann Robson, who made available to me valuable material on Mill’s activity compiled by members of the Mill Project in days past. Most of the writing done for the biographical chapters was carried out during the 2004–05 academic year, when I was on leave. The generous sympathy of my colleagues in Kenyon’s Department of History, together with the gracious support of the Provost of the College, made this leave possible. A version of the first chapter in this book was presented to the Kenyon Seminar, whose members furnished both welcome encouragement and stimulating critical commentary. For mistakes in this book, of fact or judgment, I am alone responsible. As for the crowded character of the dedication page, the persons named are immeasurably precious to me, and an opportunity of this kind may not come again.

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Introduction

This book consists of two groups of chapters. The first of these, biographical in character and of recent composition, offers a reconsideration of J.S. Mill’s formative period. The second, whose provenance dates back some years, examines topics and themes bearing upon Mill’s political thought and activity. Intellectual authority mattered to Mill principally because of the moral and political ends it could be made to serve. The latter set of chapters, in sundry ways, explores the relation between some of these ends and Mill’s conception of himself as a public intellectual. The biographical chapters investigate challenges he faced in trying to sort out what he thought of himself and what he wished to become. In part they take the form they do because of what I have become, and the challenges I have faced in trying to sort out what I think of J.S. Mill. I have visited with Mill’s politics for a long time, and have deliberately kept to a minimum excursions that involved tackling aspects of Mill’s life and works that did not relate directly to problems associated with his political thought and activity. Trained as a political historian, I had a fervent interest in Victorian political history. My turn to Mill scholarship was fortuitous and happened only after I finished my graduate work at the University of Toronto. I audited a course on Victorian prose taught by John M. Robson, general editor of Mill’s Collected Works. In luck’s grip, I soon found myself in the enviable position of postdoctoral fellow on the Mill Project. With a wealth of stimulating material at hand, and the hearty and generous encouragement of the editor of the Collected Works, I began to look at circumscribed spheres of Mill’s political engagement. The probing continued for the next quarter century. I perforce learned a fair amount about Mill that did not impinge in a straightforward way on the political issues I grappled with. If anything,

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this learning made me even more wary of confronting problems of a biographical nature that held a controversial place in Mill studies: the psychological impact of James Mill on his eldest son; the causes and nature of J.S. Mill’s “mental crisis”; the dynamics of the Mill-Harriet Taylor relationship. Although I appreciated that any rounded understanding of Mill depended on coming to grips with these problems, I was generally content to concentrate on narrow political matters that I thought had been insufficiently explored in the existing literature. In doing so, I recognized that I could thereby elucidate only a particular side of Mill, but it was a side that keenly interested me. A few years ago an opportunity arose to step away from the safe niche I had nestled into. Encouraged to embark upon a biographical investigation of Mill’s early decades, with a view to sizing up his development and character, I reckoned it was time to take a risk. I had reached the twilight of my career without having weighed in on Mill’s formative years. The time had come to revisit this period of Mill’s life in a systematic and purposeful way, so that I might work out what I thought of the young person who ultimately became the preeminent thinker of his generation. My approach involved an effort to shield myself from the large body of excellent secondary literature on Mill. I knew full well that I had, over the years, amassed an incalculable debt to the many Mill scholars who had enriched my understanding of his life and thought. I now considered it necessary, if ungrateful, to put their work aside. While I knew I could never bring a completely open mind to my revisiting of Mill’s early years, I wanted to keep the preconceptions to a minimum. Had I begun this undertaking with decided convictions of my own about what I wanted to say, I would not have felt a need to maintain a certain distance from the formidable gathering of Mill scholarship that has taken shape over the last half century. My aim was to see what I could learn about the young John Mill through a largely unmediated encounter with the relevant primary materials. The method I embraced also urged me to resist using what I thought I knew about the mature J.S. Mill to understand and explain the young John Mill. Convinced that there was something to be gained from looking at his first three decades in isolation from what he later became, I sought to come to terms with important aspects of Mill’s formative years mainly without reference to his subsequent activities and achievements. I think this inquiry has yielded some fruitful insights, and hope that others will agree, including those interested in what Mill said and did— and did not say or do—after his thirtieth birthday.

Introduction

3

Although the opening chapter does not tell a story about Mill’s youth and education fundamentally at odds with that told by Michael St. John Packe and Nicholas Capaldi in their full-scale biographies, it does emphasize certain themes not prominently featured in these valuable works.1 While acknowledging the many good things Mill derived from the education he received from his father, I suggest that these good things could have been acquired in conditions much less severe than those James Mill imposed. I also stress the importance of what John Mill refers to as his “habitual reserve,” and his “instinct of closeness,” characteristics inseparable from the strains of his upbringing.2 Holding no brief for the psychoanalytical diagnoses of Mill’s youth offered by Bruce Mazlish and P.J. Glassman, I yet accept that James Mill, however inadvertently, hampered his son’s development of a coherent identity.3 At the same time, I contend that if the father’s impact had a lot to do with the son’s mental crisis, the measure of success John Mill had in overcoming this crisis also owed something to his father. In addition to these points, I make more than others have made of John Mill’s first experience of feeling “a man among men” when in the company of Charles Austin and his friends.4 The three biographical chapters that follow have a more concentrated temporal focus than the first. One covers the years from 1826 to 1830, during which Mill—then in his early twenties—continued to absorb the effects of the mental crisis. Mill met Harriet Taylor in 1830, and the third chapter in the book examines the early years of the Mill-Harriet Taylor relationship. Not long after his connection with Harriet Taylor began, Mill came into contact with Thomas Carlyle, and the last of the biographical pieces examines the interaction of Mill and Carlyle in the first half of the 1830s. Like the first chapter, the three that come next chiefly interest themselves in matters pertaining to Mill’s character. Although each of the four biographical chapters can stand alone, the first two set the stage for what follows by conveying my notion of who John Mill was on the eve of his encounters with Taylor and Carlyle. In the latter two chapters I try to discover what Mill’s friendship with each of these powerful personalities tells us about his character. The subject of Mill’s character is at the center of Janice Carlisle’s brilliant and ambitious John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (1991). The dimensions of Carlisle’s canvas encompass the entire span of Mill’s life, and therefore extend far beyond the scope of my tableau. Her thesis, however, hinges on her interpretation of Mill’s formative years. Her intricate chain of reasoning incorporates the following links. Mill’s early education and rigorous grounding in the psychology of association

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instilled in him a conviction that his character was embodied in his writings. His famous crisis had more to do with vocation than emotion. Above all else, he wanted for himself a parliamentary career that would satisfy his longing to be a practical—and heroic—reformer of the world. The onset of the crisis, Carlisle notes, coincided with the completion of his apprenticeship at India House and his consequent recognition that a parliamentary career was out of reach. Mill’s occupational constraints and confinement within the sphere of theory bore a heavy psychic cost as he struggled to assimilate the marginal status to which he felt he had been reduced. The effects of this struggle moved Mill to direct his message to an audience of the future. Inasmuch as he could not participate practically in reforming the world in which he lived, the reforms with which he came to identify had to be the work of future generations that would have the wisdom to value his work as his contemporaries could not. The “friendship” with Harriet Taylor signified and rigidified Mill’s marginality, their way of life distancing Mill further from the realm of practical political action and underscoring his “continued subjection to external forces.”5 The limitations and disappointments he experienced forcefully affected Mill’s writings. I know that my reaction to Carlisle cannot be detached from my perception of who the mature Mill was, just as I know that this perception inevitably colors my understanding of who he was before he became an eminent Victorian. Readers of this book will allow for the influence of this distorting lens when I give my opinion that Mill never conceived of himself as a marginal figure in relation to the culture of which he was a part. In his early manhood he was no doubt sometimes unsure about the precise place he would be able to claim for himself within this culture. What young man of twenty years, Mill’s age when he completed his apprenticeship with the East India Company, feels certainty about such a matter? Yes, he regretted that his position at India House stood in the way of his ambition to sit in the House of Commons. He did not, in my view, see that it stood in the way of his being a practical reformer. John Mill regarded his father, a servant of the East India Company for the last seventeen years of his life, as an astute and notably effective man of action whose impact on his age was far from negligible. Employment at India House did not keep either James Mill or his son from giving practical political expression to their radicalism. In the chapter on J.S. Mill in the late 1820s I hold that he was well-situated for pursuing the aims he defined for himself in the wake of the mental crisis. What personal confusion, insecurity, and loneliness he experienced in these years did not arise from a sense of thwarted ambition or cultural insignificance.

Introduction

5

Carlisle’s commentary on the effects of Mill’s intimacy with Harriet Taylor chiefly relate to the period after that explored in the set of biographical chapters presented in this book. Much has been written on the Mill-Taylor friendship. The pioneering modern work on the MillTaylor association is F.A. Hayek’s John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage (1951). Hayek acts more as editor than author, and devotes two fairly short chapters to the early years of the friendship. One of these consists principally of the relevant surviving correspondence, with Hayek providing informational passages by way of introduction and conclusion. Editorial interpolations within the chapter take the form of brief commentaries that serve to link the documents. The other chapter prints the essays “On Marriage and Divorce” that Mill and Taylor exchanged early in their relationship.6 Packe’s biography appeared three years after the publication of Hayek’s volume. Despite Packe’s tendency to let his imagination run away with him, his account of the early years of the Mill-Taylor friendship offers a strong narrative line.7 It says very little, however, about the essays “On Marriage and Divorce,” from which, I believe, much can be learned about the respective parties as they were in the early 1830s. Capaldi, who by no means understates the significance of Taylor’s influence on Mill’s intellectual priorities, does not allot much space to the early years of the friendship.8 Nor can a great deal be learned about these years from Josephine Kamm’s John Stuart Mill in Love (1977), a readable but flawed work that considers the effects of a number of women on Mill (Harriet Taylor, of course, but also his mother, Sarah Austin, Eliza Flower, Harriet Martineau, and Helen Taylor).9 The book’s purpose does not allow for an in depth treatment of the early phase of the Mill-Taylor connection. Similarly, Phyllis Rose’s suggestive essay on the Mill-Taylor relationship in her book, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983), cannot accommodate a detailed investigation of its early years.10 These years do receive liberal attention in a recent work by Jo Ellen Jacobs, The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill (2002).11 Yet the unorthodox nature of this attention—a fictitious Harriet Taylor diary created by Jacobs—renders hazardous any comparison of my findings with those of Jacobs (especially since Mill occupies a subordinate place in her account, while Taylor occupies a subordinate place in mine). The question of Harriet Taylor’s influence on Mill has given rise to a considerable literature, most of it concerned with the character and extent of Taylor’s impact on what Mill wrote between 1848 and 1858.12 Although my discussion closes with a brief assessment of Harriet Taylor’s influence on Mill’s intellectual development during the 1830s, it has nothing to say about what

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happened thereafter. A good deal has also been written on Mill and the issue of sexual equality.13 My look at the early years of the Mill-Taylor friendship may indirectly have a bearing on this problem, one that is incidental to the object of the essay. The limited scope and narrowly biographical purpose of the chapter afford special analytical opportunities, which I have tried to seize. Scholars pay attention to Harriet Taylor mainly because of her importance in Mill’s life; Carlyle’s historical standing in no way depends on his association with Mill. While anyone trying to write a comprehensive biography of either man would certainly have occasion to say something about the other, none would feel called upon to furnish a comprehensive account of their friendship during the 1830s. Packe has more to say on the matter than Capaldi, but neither attempts a systematic and detailed investigation of the subject (such a treatment would surely have affected adversely the rhythm and pace of their studies). The same can be said of Fred Kaplan’s biography of Carlyle.14 A couple of books have been devoted to a comparative examination of the thought of Mill and Carlyle. In these works the two men serve as representative figures of their age. The titles aptly convey the purview of each book. Emery Neff’s major scholarly study, Carlyle and Mill: Mystic and Utilitarian, was published in 1924; it was republished in 1926, with a new subtitle, An Introduction to Victorian Thought.15 Richard Pankhurst’s less ambitious (and less satisfying) work, The Saint Simonians, Mill and Carlyle: A Preface to Modern Thought, appeared in 1957.16 Both books, of course, discuss Mill and Carlyle in the 1830s, but with ends in mind that differ from the aim of my chapter. This aim is not to explore the thought of Mill and Carlyle during the thirties, but to learn what their friendship reveals about Mill’s understanding of himself. The last third of J.S. Mill Revisited consists of three chapters on political themes. Two of these initially took the form of journal articles; the last of the three I composed for a festschrift honoring John Robson. I hope my bringing them together as a set will be welcomed by readers interested in Mill’s politics. Although I have rewritten the essays on the ballot and on party to render the prose more readable, their substance remains essentially unchanged. The Mill scholarship on the topics themselves, scanty before I tried to explain his change of mind on the ballot and his notion of party, has not grown much since the journal articles appeared. The index to The Cambridge Companion to Mill, an estimable collaborative work that runs to nearly six hundred pages, has no entries for the ballot or for party.17 Among Mill scholars, to be sure, philosophers greatly outnumber historians, and the priorities of the former will not

Introduction

7

steer them toward Mill’s apostasy on the ballot question or his attitude toward party. I readily admit that there is not a great deal to be said on either subject; there is, however, something to be said (including, no doubt, something different from what I have chosen to say). Few political historians, as distinct from historians of political thought, have seen fit to make Mill their principal object of study. I happened to be drawn to these particular problems because of my abiding interest in Victorian politics. The treatment I give them is in keeping with my belief that a heavy dose of contextualization can enhance our understanding of Mill’s political thinking. The chapter capping this book, which investigates the ebb and flow of Mill’s political radicalism between the 1830s and the late 1860s, draws on this conviction to illuminate the apparent disparity between Mill’s political theory and his political activism. Its fusing of biographical and political elements makes it a suitable finale.

CHAPTER

ONE

The Father, the Son, and the Manly Spirit

It is not easy to discuss J.S. Mill’s childhood and education without regard for what he ultimately became. The principal source for that childhood and education is his Autobiography. The first draft of this classic account was composed in 1853–54, when Mill was middle-aged and justly renowned as the author of A System of Logic (1843) and The Principles of Political Economy (1848). Its purposes were shaped by the personal and didactic concerns of Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, during the first half of the 1850s. In the opening paragraph of what has come to be known as the “Early Draft,” Mill offers two reasons for writing his autobiography: first, the age in which he lived evinced a conspicuous interest in education and a record of his own “unusual and remarkable” training could throw valuable light on what could be learned in childhood; second, that age was also one of “transition in opinions” and as such stood to gain from “noting the successive phases of any mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of others.” The final version of Mill’s Autobiography (he last worked on the text in 1869–70) adds a third object, one that mattered to him, he says, more than the others. He wanted to pay formal acknowledgment to those who contributed to his moral and intellectual growth, “some of them of recognized eminence, others less known than they deserve to be, and the one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world had no opportunity of knowing.”1 Harriet Taylor Mill was the person “to whom most of all is due.”

The Father, the Son, and the Manly Spirit

9

A fourth aim, though no less fundamental than the other three, is left unstated in the opening paragraph. Mill and Taylor wished to seize control over the telling of their own story. In Taylor’s words, “every ground should be occupied by ourselves on our own subject.”2 Only the parties to the relationship had the means (and the motive) to show the purity and high-mindedness that continuously informed it. As a source of information on Mill’s early years, the Autobiography is indispensable; as a source of judgments about these years, it must be treated with caution. All three of his stated purposes relate in some way to his development. The perspective he adopts on his formative years is markedly influenced by his conception of what he had become and the means by which he had got there. His explicit motives, expressed in plain and concise language, overlay a deep and rich subsoil of intention. In giving effect to purposes one and two, Mill meant to show, among other things, that the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity—that is, “formation of character by circumstance”—enjoyed a more limited writ than was often supposed. Mill tells his readers that this doctrine, at a critical juncture in his life, had “weighed on my existence like an incubus.” The outcome of his intellectual and psychological struggle to lift this burden was a conviction that the human will could influence circumstances and thereby affect subsequent motives and actions.3 Notwithstanding an education that had greatly privileged analysis over feeling, Mill found within himself the resources to cultivate his imagination and sympathies. He achieved a balance that allowed him to attain both mental and emotional maturity. This achievement also helped him to take measure of the currents and cross-currents of opinion symptomatic of an age of transition. Drawing upon his training and his will, he zealously sought to construct a coherent synthesis, the Autobiography registering in summary form the learning, unlearning, and better learning this process entailed.4 In these ways Mill uses his personal story to exemplify the triumph of will and intellect necessary to grasp the spirit of the age and to promote human improvement. His treatment of his childhood is governed in part by his sense of its bearing upon the problem of determinism and his resolution of that problem; in part by his need to link the early years of his life to the subsequent stages of development that made him a representative figure of his times and an individual capable of making a profound impact on those times; and in very considerable part by his need to raise the ghost of his father, James Mill, and lay that ghost to rest. The forceful personality and imposing intellect of James Mill pervade the opening chapters of the Autobiography. In stating that his supreme motive for writing his story was to acknowledge what he owed to

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others, the younger Mill had his father preeminently in mind when he referred to “others less known than they deserve to be.” Far less wellknown than James Mill, at the time J.S. Mill told his story, was Harriet Taylor, for whose sake much of what he had to tell needed to be told. J.S. Mill would have his readers think that he owed less to James Mill than to Harriet Taylor. No discerning reader of the Autobiography is likely to accord Harriet Taylor this precedence. Mill’s absurdly inflated encomium has the effect of making Harriet Taylor come across as the fictive creation of an author who had permitted his emotional needs to corrupt his judgment. The James Mill of whom we read in the Autobiography, in contrast, has a compelling presence whose sway was unmistakably colossal. Yet he could not be given top billing without compromising the standing his son was bent upon assigning Taylor. Equally significant, recognition of James Mill as the paramount influence in J.S. Mill’s mental and moral development was incompatible with the spin the latter needed to give the doctrine of Necessity in relation to his own story. If J.S. Mill was indeed a “manufactured man,” as he says he at one time feared, the identity of his maker could not be doubted. The younger Mill had to rid himself of the “incubus” and show that he had been able to take a decisive hand in forging his own development. In paying tribute to his father he had also to illumine the path by which he won independence from him. Harriet Taylor did not present anything like the same problem. She was Mill’s contemporary, not his senior; she had nothing like the education he possessed; she did not threaten his idea of how he got to be the man he was. Mill had handled the most serious effects of the “crisis” in his “mental history” before he met Harriet Taylor in 1830. Part of what made him her worthy partner, we are led to assume, was the independent growth he had experienced in the several years after the onset of the crisis. The tidy structure J.S. Mill wanted to give his development could not accommodate a prominent role for his father in the years after 1826. In the Autobiography he strove to give a fair assessment of his father’s faults and virtues as a thinker, educator, and man; it was far more difficult for him to come to terms with how much he remained his father’s son even after attaining manhood.5 To appreciate this difficulty we must investigate the years before the younger Mill reached maturity. * * * The man who molded John Mill’s early moral and intellectual growth was born in the Scottish hamlet of Northwater Bridge, Forfarshire, in 1773.

The Father, the Son, and the Manly Spirit

11

James Mill was the eldest son of James Milne, a shoemaker, and Isabel Fenton. Alexander Bain, James Mill’s biographer, found that local tradition remembered Isabel Fenton as a woman of notable social pretension.6 Her son’s certificate of birth gave his surname as “Mill,” a form more English than Scottish. As a child James Mill showed signs of unusual ability, and his mother aspired to see her talented son rise to a position of consequence. Given ample opportunity for study despite his family’s lack of resources, James Mill did not squander his main chance. Academic success at the local parish school won him the solicitude and encouragement of the local minister, and the means were found to send him to Montrose Academy. Having made a name for himself as an exceptionally gifted young scholar, he was taken up by Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart, who spent their summers not far from James Mill’s birthplace. They employed Mill to act as tutor to their daughter Wilhelmina, for whom James Mill developed powerful feelings. Just how powerful can be seen in a letter he wrote to his friend Francis Place in 1817, years after Wilhelmina’s death. “So you see I owe much to Sir John Stuart, who had a daughter, one only child, about the same age as myself, who besides being a beautiful woman, was in point of intellect and disposition one of the most perfect human beings I have ever known. We grew up together and studied together from children, and were about the best friends that either of us ever had.”7 The Stuarts could not regard the son of a shoemaker as a suitable candidate for their daughter’s hand; they could see their way to sponsoring James Mill’s matriculation at the University of Edinburgh, in the expectation that he would study for the ministry. James Mill dutifully complied, and then obtained a license to preach. It seems he made sparse use of this qualification. In 1802 Mill, like many Scots before him, and not a few after, left for London, where he intended to make his living by his pen. Make his living he did, gaining sufficient employment as journalist and editor of ephemeral weeklies and monthlies to consider marriage within less than three years after his arrival in London. In 1804 he proposed to Harriet Burrow, whose mother, a widow, operated an asylum for lunatics. They wed the following year. Less than a year later, Harriet Mill gave birth to a son. When this son, John Stuart, composed the final draft of his Autobiography he did not mention his mother. He began the account of his life with the sentence: “I was born in London, on the 20th of May 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of The History of British India.”8 To father and son alike, she evidently was something of an embarrassment. It is safe to assume that it was not the quality of her mind that had drawn James Mill to her. Bain notes that she was “an exceedingly pretty woman.”9 Twenty-two years of age at

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the time of her marriage—James Mill was then thirty-two—the bride could have had but little idea of what lay in store for her. As Bain puts it: “Mrs. Mill was not wanting in any of the domestic virtues of an English mother. She toiled hard for her house and children, and became thoroughly obedient to her lord.” This obedience did not win her James Mill’s continuing affection and regard; neither did it make Harriet Mill contented with her lot. “An admired beauty,” Bain observes, “she seems to have been chagrined at the discovery of her position after marriage. There was disappointment on both sides: the union was never happy.”10 On James Mill’s side the disappointment was almost certainly compounded by fond memories of Wilhelmina Stuart. Although unhappy, the marriage had a copious aspect. John would be the eldest of nine children. Between his birth in May 1806 and his father’s India House appointment as an Assistant to the Examiner of India Correspondence in May 1819, James Mill’s rapidly expanding family threatened to outstrip his limited means. Not long after John’s arrival, his father set to work on the history of British India, a project he calculated would take three years to complete. It took ten years, during which James Mill’s modest earnings derived chiefly from articles he contributed to the Edinburgh Review, the great Whig periodical. In these years James Mill also took it upon himself to educate his eldest son, which presumably further reduced the time available for producing ephemeral pieces that would have brought in additional income. Jeremy Bentham, during this trying stretch, made a philanthropic project of the Mills. James Mill’s struggle to keep out of debt proved somewhat more successful than his struggle to keep out of his wife’s bed. He understood, on personal economic grounds and on general Malthusian lines, the importance of sexual restraint. An impressive self-mastery figured among the attributes recommending the elder Mill to those who greatly admired him. In his conjugal relations, however, self-mastery eluded him. James Mill’s contempt for his wife may have arisen not only from what he took to be her deficient intellect; he may also have held her responsible for his inability to control a physical appetite that gave him more children than he knew what to do with. He thought he knew what to do with John, and when the others came along they were turned over to the eldest child for their lessons. For both James Mill and his first-born, Mrs. Mill’s fecundity was something of an affliction. This is not to suggest that the young John Mill passed his time thinking about the regrettable results of his mother’s reproductive performance. His education, which began early, was wholly under the direction of his father. James Mill’s aims, method, and manner ensured that he would be

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at the center of the boy’s universe. The elder Mill’s belief in the cardinal importance of education, coupled with his conviction that no school in early nineteenth-century Britain had the competence to provide proper mental and moral training, moved him to take charge of his son’s tuition. James Mill, schooled in the psychology of Locke and Hartley, held that all mental phenomena sprang from sensory elements and could be explained by the principle of association. The simultaneous or successive experience of sensations produces simultaneous or successive ideas. The process gives rise to clusters of ideas and we cease to be aware of the simple elements from which the clusters are constructed. The primary duty of the educator was to foster in his pupil the formation of salutary associations. James Mill had an unbounded confidence in the capacity of education to promote moral and mental excellence, and the education of his son was in part intended to demonstrate the validity of this notion.11 Less than two months after the birth of this son James Mill wrote a letter to William Forbes, who had married the daughter of Sir John Stuart. Like Mill himself, Forbes had recently become a father. The elder Mill’s pleasure in his own changed status is palpable—“The boy is as fine a child as possible”—as is his desire to show what he could make of the infant responsible for that pleasure. I intend to run a fair race with you in the education of a son. Let us have a well-disputed trial which of us twenty years hence can exhibit the most accomplished & virtuous young man. If I can beat you in this contest, I shall not envy that you have yours the richest. I know not how far I may fall from my good resolves in this as I do in most other cases, but I have a strong determination at present to exert myself to the utmost to see what the power of education can do.12 James Mill’s earnest and unfaltering perseverance in this undertaking is classically attested to in his son’s Autobiography. Nearly thirty-five years before that document began to take shape, the elder Mill summarized for a correspondent the course of John’s education from infancy to adolescence. Being convinced of the advantages which a father enjoyed in swaying the mind of his child, & being occupied wholly at home when I first became a father, I began with my first child, a son. The principle of imitation, seeing books my grand occupation, made his curiosity attach itself to books; & when in our little intercourse he

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desired to look at a book, instead of showing him pictures, I showed him letters. In this way, without any trouble he knew the letters, & more (how much more I do not recollect) before he was 18 months old—& before he was three years old he could read English perfectly. The same principle of imitation led his curiosity to Greek books, owing to the novelty of the character. I availed myself in like manner of this curiosity to make him acquainted with the Greek characters, & after that with the inflections of the nouns & verbs. In the mean time he was occupied with maps; & by the time he was five years old, he knew a good deal of Greek, & was acquainted with geography even to minuteness. Greek went on, & reading simple books of history, for perhaps a couple of years, during which he had begun arithmetic. With Latin . . . he became acquainted very rapidly, having first learned Greek. In this way, he has gone on; & from no part of his time having been allowed to go to waste, his acquirements are very unusual at his years. He is not 14 years old till next may [sic]—& he is not only a good Greek & Latin scholar, but he has actually read, almost all the Greek & Latin classics—he is well versed in Mathematics even fluxions & the higher branches—I know of nobody who has in his memory a greater amount of historical facts—I have taught him Logic, & I have taught him political economy . . . [H]e has also a good knowledge of chemistry. His studies were always carried on in company with me. He sat in my room, & studied when I studied—& though attending to him when he needed it produced some interruption, yet all I have done, was done under it.13 James Mill was satisfied that “no part of” his son’s time had “been allowed to go to waste”; in his Autobiography the son remarks upon the “wretched waste of so many precious years as are spent acquiring the modicum of Latin and Greek commonly taught to schoolboys,” and credits his father with having taken “great effort to give, during the years of childhood, an amount of knowledge in what are considered the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of manhood.”14 This education, moreover, “was not an education of cram.” James Mill, his son notes, “strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking, I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.” Exhausted he must often have been. James Mill, it seems, did not hesitate to show where his son’s understanding had proven deficient.

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The pupil’s “recollection of such matters is almost wholly of failures, hardly ever of success.”15 The learning environment created by James Mill wore a menacing aspect. Francis Place, who greatly admired James Mill, had an opportunity to observe the latter’s instructional practices in August 1817. “His method is by far the best I ever witnessed, and is infinitely precise; but he is excessively severe. No fault, however trivial, escapes his notice; none goes without reprehension or punishment of some sort.”16 Discussion of facts and ideas certainly occurred; one of the parties, however, dominated the discussion, through force of character and threatening demeanor as much as through cumulative experience and power of intellect. Soon after the education of John Mill began, James Mill became acquainted with Jeremy Bentham. In 1808 James Mill wrote an article for the Annual Register that bestowed high praise on Bentham, whose work was “entitled to profound regard. Of all the men, in all ages, and in all countries, who have made philosophy of law their study, he has made the greatest progress.”17 To be admired by a man of Mill’s faculties appealed to Bentham’s vanity. Although Mill was a man with projects of his own who deeply valued his personal independence, he considered the propagation of Bentham’s doctrines a matter of supreme importance. He would become Bentham’s most influential disciple. From 1809 to 1818 their friendship was a central element in the lives of both men. In 1810 Mill agreed to live in a Westminster house that belonged to Bentham (this house, close to Bentham’s garden, had once been occupied by Milton). When this home proved unsatisfactory, Mill moved his family to Newington Green, a change that did not prevent him from visiting Bentham frequently at the latter’s house in Queen Square Place. Such visiting was made a good deal easier in 1814 when Bentham persuaded Mill to become his neighbor by offering to pay half the rent on a house at 1 Queen Square. (In October 1813 the government had made Jeremy Bentham a rich man by awarding him £23,000 in compensation for failing to implement his Panopticon prison scheme.) From 1814 through 1818 Mill and his family also spent about half of each year with Bentham at Ford Abbey, a large Somersetshire country house near Chard. The association was not without strain, the two men’s personalities and habits being strikingly dissimilar. Austere, efficient, and resolute, Mill applied his sustained concentration to what he took to be his duties. Bentham’s waywardness formed a marked contrast. Although the great man sought to provide comprehensive and systematic coverage of the many topics he addressed, he completed but a small portion of his

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ambitious undertakings, signaling a personal constitution subject to fits of caprice and distraction. So, at least, it often must have seemed to James Mill. Yet he remained unswervingly loyal to the Benthamite cause of fundamental legal and political reform. His rendering of that cause, in discussion and in print, gave it a tone and cogency that a band of young acolytes would find compelling. (In Elie Halévy’s words, “Bentham gave Mill a doctrine, and Mill gave Bentham a school.”)18 James Mill’s eldest son would, for a time, be among the most strident of these adherents. The father expected no less. The training so assiduously given his first child was designed, in large part, to cultivate a mind capable of carrying forward the Benthamite program after Jeremy Bentham and James Mill were gone.19 A set of sharply defined suppositions concerning human nature and society underpinned this program. Bentham assumed that all actions arising from the exercise of human will stemmed from a desire to procure some pleasure or escape some pain (he did not fail to see that the range of pleasures and pains motivating individuals was considerable).20 Although he recognized that sympathy and benevolence—nonself-regarding pleasures—could affect human conduct, he nonetheless held that “in the general tenor of life, in every human breast, selfregarding interest is predominant over all other interests put together.”21 This Bentham did not lament, for the survival of the human species had depended upon the operation of the “self-preference” principle. Human nature itself prescribed that each individual should seek to maximize his own happiness or pleasure, and Bentham’s system made no room for the notion that human nature either could or should be altered. The defining characteristic distinguishing his concept of utility from that of Hume or Helvetius was “the greatest happiness principle.” The object of a healthy social order should be “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” and the value of all actions should be measured in relation to this end. Bentham, however, did not suppose that individuals would in fact attempt to make such calculations. The pursuit of individual selfinterest, to be encouraged as a rule, could conflict with the larger interest of the community in promoting the greatest happiness principle. Government had been instituted to protect life and property; its aim was to give individuals the security needed to advance their self-interests without fear of violence or arbitrary expropriation. Application of the greatest happiness principle was chiefly to be entrusted to legislators, who had the responsibility to put in place the legal and institutional arrangements favorable to increasing the aggregate quantity of happiness.22

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This task involved devising the means that would induce individuals to seek happiness in ways that would not harm others; better yet, these means should encourage conduct contributive to the happiness of others. Inasmuch as people were largely driven by desire for pleasure and aversion to pain, rewards and punishments—or the prospect of such— were the instruments to be applied by the legislator. The main role of rewards was to stimulate individuals to engage in activity beneficial to the public. The activity at issue and the rewards available were limited in nature and could not be relied upon to elicit a response from the great bulk of the population. Clubs outnumbered hearts in the deck from which the legislator had to draw. Bentham wished to give people motives for refraining from self-regarding actions whose consequences would be socially injurious: actions that would reduce the community’s sum of happiness. Only the threat and, where unavoidable, imposition of penalties could furnish such motives.23 The realization of Bentham’s schemes for radical legal reform therefore hinged on the presence of a legislature with the competence and public spirit to see what needed to be done and to act accordingly. As of 1809, Bentham had become convinced that the British Parliament, as then constituted, was far too corrupt to perform this function (the frustration occasioned by the government’s handling of his Panopticon project probably had some bearing on this judgment). The landed classes controlled the political system, and they unsurprisingly used their predominance to advance their own interests at the expense of the rest of the community (so Bentham had concluded). The legislature would serve the general interest—the aggregate of all individual interests—only when the representative system allowed for the effective expression of that interest. Bentham thus embraced political radicalism. In his Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) he advocated universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and the secret ballot.24 It is almost certainly no accident that Bentham’s turn toward political radicalism coincided with the formation of his close association with James Mill. The latter, believing ignorance to be the chief obstacle to progress, devoted much thought and energy to educational reform. The masses lacked the knowledge to understand that their long-term happiness called for them to discipline their bodily appetites, which they were inclined to gratify immediately and to excess whenever opportunity presented. Their rulers wanted to keep them in this condition; were the people to know the real sources of their misery they would insist on the institutional reforms necessary for a proper calculation to be made of the public good. Such reforms would inevitably deprive the aristocracy

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of their political ascendancy and roll back their pernicious influence. Much of James Mill’s political writing was directed at showing the better educated among the middling elements that the perpetuation of aristocratic power was incompatible with social progress. He presumably had a part in persuading Bentham that such was the case. These ideas turned up regularly in the discussions James Mill had with his eldest son. J.S. Mill notes that his education had, “in a certain sense,” been “a course in Benthamism,” this sense being that he had “always been taught to apply” Bentham’s greatest happiness principle.25 Yet his response in the winter of 1821–22 to reading the Traité de Législation, Etienne Dumont’s redaction of Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, implies that his education had been less doctrinaire than might be thought. In his Autobiography he writes: “The reading of this book was an epoch in my life; one of the turning points in my mental history.” He amplifies: “when I laid down the last volume of the Traité I had become a different being. The ‘principle of utility,’ understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it . . . fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary parts of my knowledge and beliefs.”26 Had his education been rigidly Benthamite in character, his reading of Dumont’s redaction would not have had such a transformative effect. Although his learning and convictions before 1821–22 were “detached” and “fragmentary,” the knowledge and understanding he acquired as a youth and brought to his reading of Bentham possessed a startling range and depth for one of his age. The beneficiary of this education, ingenuously or otherwise, rejected the notion that he possessed exceptional abilities.27 Yet the tutelage of James Mill and the ample library of Jeremy Bentham clearly found fertile soil in John Mill’s powerful young mind. Even James Mill had to acknowledge this power, if only by implication. Just a couple of years before reading the Traité, John had received from his father “a complete course of political economy.”28 The outcome proved satisfactory to the preceptor himself, whose pride in both the instruction on offer and the intellectual equipment of the pupil is obvious. “I have taught him Logic, & I have taught him political economy. Mr. Ricardo [Ricardo’s seminal On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation had been published in 1817] who was interrogating him the other day, says he knows nobody by whom even the most abstruse points of the science are better understood.”29 At the time this was written his son was still short of his fourteenth birthday. John Mill’s education gave him, by his own account, “an advantage of a quarter of

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a century over his cotemporaries.”30 James Mill’s aim was to give his eldest son the means to achieve intellectual and moral excellence. The training he imposed was not intended to school his pupil in a “system” of thought that was to be accepted uncritically. The unfettered and impartial exercise of the critical intelligence could not yield false conclusions. In his Liberty of the Press (1821) James Mill declared: “Every man, possessed of reason, is accustomed to weigh evidence, and to be guided and determined by its preponderance.”31 If James Mill had his way, no one would weigh evidence with greater acuity, discrimination, and understanding than his eldest son, who would arrive at the conclusions arrived at by his father simply because they were true. The intellectual excellence James Mill fostered in John would enable him to learn what was true; the moral excellence he sought to instill would make John’s actions consistent with his knowledge. In James Mill’s 1806 letter to William Forbes, quoted above, reference is made to a contest between the two men to see who could produce “the most accomplished & virtuous young man.” A letter written some fifteen years later alludes to James Mill’s hopes for his son’s “making a shinin[g] character.”32 For Bentham and James Mill the greatest happiness principle was the standard by which actions should be judged. In some respects, however, James Mill was an odd sort of utilitarian. “[H]e had scarcely any belief in pleasure,” his son reports. James Mill ascribed the “greatest number of miscarriages in life . . . to the overvaluing of pleasures.”33 By the time the education of John had begun James Mill had ceased to be a Christian (if he had ever truly been one) and had become a skeptic; the puritan strain characteristic of the Presbyterianism in which he had been reared nonetheless retained a conspicuous hold on him. “My father’s moral inculcations,” John states, “were at all times mainly those of the ‘Socratici viri’; justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labour.” James Mill esteemed “a life of exertion, in contradiction to one of self-indulgent sloth.”34 As his invoking of the “Socratici viri” suggests, John Mill was disposed to link these attributes to the influence of the ancients on his father’s convictions and character. The linkage may well be justified, but the influence worked upon a sensibility that bore the imprint of a Presbyterian upbringing.35 The moral instruction James Mill conveyed to his son was not free of ambiguity. The Socratic virtues valued by James Mill would also be prized by John Mill. Together they read Xenophon’s Memorabilia, upon which James Mill offered comments. From this experience the younger Mill came to see Socrates “as a model of moral excellence.”36 John Mill

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recalled how his father “impressed upon me the lesson of the ‘Choice of Hercules,’ ” a choice between happiness, as commonly (or vulgarly) understood, and virtue. James Mill made plain his strong preference for the latter. Free and fearless inquiry also ranked high in James Mill’s estimation. Although John Mill was “brought up from the first without any religious belief,”37 his father taught him “to take the strongest interest in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest against priestly tyranny and liberty of thought.”38 All the same, James Mill cautioned his son against revealing his want of religious faith. Better to leave unsaid certain things one thought. In early-nineteenth-century England, blasphemy was a crime (the common-law offense still exists); the real threat of prosecution and incarceration aside, declarations of hostility to Christianity could mark a person as irresponsible and unsafe. (Arguing vigorously for freedom of religious expression was a different matter.) The young John Mill, it seems, had trouble adhering to his father’s injunction, which had more the flavor of temporizing than of temperance (John, it must be said, would not have put it this way). Had not one of the charges against the heroic Socrates been blasphemy? No one in James Mill’s England bold enough to take on Christianity had to worry about suffering the punishment imposed on Socrates. Refusal to avow what one believed for fear of censure smacked of hypocrisy and cowardice, and John Mill remembered two instances from his youth when he felt obliged to reject his father’s advice. “My opponents were boys, considerably older than myself: one of them I certainly staggered at the time, but the subject was never renewed between us: the other, who was surprised and somewhat shocked, did his best to convince me for some time, without effect.”39 The mature John Mill tended to heed his father’s advice, notwithstanding his assertion in the Autobiography that there had been a “great advance in liberty of discussion” since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Men of James Mill’s strong convictions, intelligence, and devotion to the public good should now be forthright in stating their religious views, however unpopular those views might be. Yet, even in the more enlightened mid-nineteenth century, reticence was justified if an individual risked losing his livelihood or faced “exclusion from some sphere of usefulness peculiarly suitable to the capacities of the individual.”40 The second exception had to be allowed for J.S. Mill to satisfy his own scruples. As late as the mid-1860s he refused to say publicly that he was not a Christian. When facing the electors of Westminster at the 1865 general election, he pointedly declined to answer any question bearing upon his religious creed.41 In November

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1868, in the midst of allegations of atheism spawned by his donation to the campaign of England’s most notorious atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, Mill went so far as to send a letter to the newspapers in which he defied anyone to cite a single passage from his voluminous writings in support of such a charge.42 Mill’s most direct remarks on his religious position appear in the Autobiography and in his Three Essays on Religion, both published posthumously.43 The moral training given John Mill had enduring effects. The conduct it inculcated was not all of a piece. * * * A pause in James Mill’s direct supervision and surveillance of his son’s education occurred in 1820. In May John left England for France, where he spent much of the next year. He had been invited to stay with Sir Samuel Bentham and his family, who had taken up domicile in Pompignan, not far from Toulouse. Sir Samuel, the younger brother of Jeremy, was a remarkable individual in his own right. A brilliant and versatile man, he had achieved some distinction as a naval architect, inventor, and mineralogist. He had done a stint as a brigadier general in the army of Russia’s Catherine the Great, and another as Inspector General of His Majesty’s Naval Works. His wife, Maria Sophia Bentham, was the daughter of George Fordyce, an eminent Scottish physician and chemist. A highly cultivated and confident woman, Lady Bentham managed the household and organized and superintended many of John Mill’s activities during his stay with the family. This lively household included three daughters and a son. The latter, George, John’s senior by six years, had displayed an intellectual precocity little less spectacular than that of his younger guest. He became one of the nineteenth century’s foremost botanists (John Mill’s abiding enthusiasm for botany began during his sojourn with the Benthams). Here was a family that could appreciate John Mill’s uncommon attainments without being awed by them.44 John was evidently unaware that any family should be awed by these attainments. He notes that he “had no notion of any superiority” in himself. James Mill had done his utmost to ensure that his eldest son would not develop a lofty view of his own accomplishments. The sermon he gave John shortly before the latter’s departure for France was characteristic of the elder Mill’s efforts in this sphere. John was informed that he could claim no credit for knowing more than other boys his age; that he did so sprang from his “very unusual advantage . . . in having a father who was able to teach” him and who was “willing to give the

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necessary trouble and time.” The idea that he might deserve “praise” for what he had learned cut no ice with James Mill. In light of John’s privileged educational circumstances, it would have been “the deepest disgrace” to him had he failed to acquire more knowledge than his contemporaries. Owing to these circumstances, it should be said, John had been kept ignorant of his contemporaries’ relative ignorance. He assures readers of his Autobiography that he never felt disposed to congratulate himself (self-congratulation would have been a remarkable feat for a recipient of James Mill’s lavish attention); his father’s admonition concerning the praiseworthiness of his achievements met with a ready assent. Now that the subject of his “acquirements” had been broached by James Mill, John “felt that what my father had said respecting my peculiar advantages was exactly the truth and common sense of the matter, and it fixed my opinion and feeling from that time forward.”45 Not long after this conversation John caught the Dover coach and headed for France. Some twenty years later he would refer to his months abroad in 1820–21 as “les plus heureux de ma jeunesse.”46 It is easy to see why. He had the company of the convivial and stimulating Bentham family; opportunities to view sublime scenery of a kind altogether different from what he had previously encountered; enjoyable botanical expeditions with George Bentham; meetings with French radicals and intellectuals; the satisfaction of winning a growing mastery of the French language; the bracing experience of attending courses at the University of Montpellier; and the nourishment—so it was to the eldest son of James Mill—of an ambitious program of study.47 Contributing to this happiness, there is reason to think, was the absence of James Mill. Not that his father could have been absent from the boy’s thoughts. James Mill had told his son to keep a record of all that he did, and John understood for whom the record was being kept. Simply to be out from under his father’s gaze, however, must have lessened considerably the anxiety aroused by his hitherto pervasive presence. A passage that Harriet Taylor Mill cancelled from the Early Draft of her husband’s Autobiography offers a glimpse of the shell the son constructed in response to this gaze. I . . . grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear: and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing-up, in the stunting of my moral growth. One of these, which it would have required a quick sensibility and impulsiveness of natural temperament to counteract, was habitual reserve. Without knowing or believing that I was reserved, I grew up with an instinct of closeness. I had no one to

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whom I desired to express everything which I felt; and the only person I was in communication with, to whom I looked up, I had too much fear of, to make the communication to him of any act or feeling ever a matter of frank impulse or spontaneous inclination.48 This may, or may not, be understatement; assuredly it is not exaggeration. John Mill was a dutiful, loyal, and grateful son. Filial piety informs most of what he wrote about his father. In a January 1854 journal entry, composed about the same time the Early Draft was under way, J.S. Mill protested at the failure of his own generation to appreciate his father’s true stature: “Who was ever better entitled to take his place among the great names of England? He worked all his life long with complete disinterestedness for the public good; he had no little influence on opinion while he lived, most of the reforms which are so much boasted of may be traced mainly to him, and in vigour of intellect and character he stood quite alone among the men of his generation.”49 His veneration for his father’s memory did not keep John Mill from remembering that he had grown up “in the absence of love and in the presence of fear.” There is no open expression of resentment; no urge to assign blame. John Mill would not believe that his father’s want of tenderness “lay in his own nature.” Like Englishmen generally, James Mill repressed his feelings from a sense that to display them was unmanly. Habitual repression led to emotional deprivation. When allowance was made for his being in the “trying position of sole teacher,” and for his “constitutionally irritable” temperament, who could not “feel true pity for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source”?50 James Mill’s unwavering devotion to duty in the face of vexing circumstances may well have entitled him to such retrospective consideration. He chose to be his eldest son’s “sole teacher”; in teaching most of the children who followed John, James Mill had an able assistant. Yet his position was “trying” enough. For a number of years he undertook the task of instructing John while struggling to support a rapidly growing family, enduring a marriage that brought him no joy and some exasperation, and doggedly carrying on with his History of British India. In showing imaginative sympathy for his father’s predicament, the mature J.S. Mill also shows a sensibility superior to that possessed by the object of his pity. James Mill, one supposes, would have bristled at his son’s patronizing tone. The notion that he was conscious of the fear he evoked in his children is perhaps the most striking aspect of the passage

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quoted above. How someone whose feelings had been enfeebled could have “constantly” felt that the fear he kindled had deprived him of his children’s affection is hard to fathom. The treatment of this fraught subject in the pages of the Autobiography reveals much about the difficulty J.S. Mill had in coming to grips with the memory of a father who had been both the great intellectual benefactor and the oppressive emotional bane of his childhood. Compassion for James Mill’s plight could be more easily mustered after his death. The weight of James Mill’s authoritarian demeanor must have put considerable stress on his son’s psychological constitution. A robust example of James Mill’s peremptory manner is found in a letter he wrote to his great friend David Ricardo in 1818. By this time Ricardo, James Mill’s senior by one year, had established himself as a brilliant and influential political economist. The subject of the communication was the method Ricardo should adopt to master the composition of an effective argument. James Mill told his friend that the “discourses” they had spoken of should “be written without delay.” He then gave a detailed and sequential outline of the mode by which Ricardo must proceed. The imperative voice richly informed James Mill’s closing remarks. One thing more, however; you must write your discourses, with the purpose of sending them to me. Depend upon it, this will be stimulus, not without its use. I will be the representative of an audience, of a public; and even if you had in your eye a person whom you respect much less than you do me, it would be a motive both to bestow the labour more regularly, as it should be; and to increase the force of your attention. Therefore no apologies, and no excuses will be listened to.51 Ricardo did not live with James Mill. The young John Mill could not opt to have anyone other than his father in his “eye.” And what he saw could not fail to command respect and incite fear. James Mill gave his son a compelling “motive” to engage in rigorous study; his vigilant superintendence of John’s education powerfully concentrated the “force” of his son’s “attention.” The dictatorial implementation of this program cost James Mill his son’s affection. John Mill too paid dearly. In the Autobiography J.S. Mill says that his father’s “severity . . . was not such as to prevent me from having a happy childhood.”52 That this “severity” detracted from his happiness is plain. James Mill’s harshness caused some suffering, and it is arguable that this harshness was unnecessary to the achievement of the ends he had in view. John Mill does not

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suggest this. Indeed, he asserts that “Much must be done, and much must be learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability to punishment, are indispensable as means.”53 This conviction might have issued from the frustration John Mill experienced in teaching his younger siblings. It was also born of the need to believe that a large part of what his father had put him through had been essential to his intellectual development. Yet it is reasonable to think that John would have accomplished a great deal under a much milder regime. His father undoubtedly stimulated and fed his hunger for knowledge. The hunger itself, however, belonged to the son. His love of learning, coupled with his exceptional ability, made him an unusually apt pupil. The tractability he demonstrated did not stem from a “rigid discipline” imposed from without or from a “known liability to punishment.” He wanted to learn as much as he could, and thus he was “happy” despite the exacting and imperious rule of his father. Such a reflection renders all the more poignant the passage in the Autobiography where Mill reckoned the cost of what he had endured. I do not, then, believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with; but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and spontaneous communicativeness in the child’s nature, it is an evil for which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.54 Fear did so predominate in the case of John Mill. * * * In his autobiographical account J.S. Mill notes that when he returned from France his father no longer acted as his “schoolmaster.” John’s education nonetheless remained, for a time, under James Mill’s “general direction.”55 During the summer and autumn of 1821 James Mill was readying for publication his Elements of Political Economy, a book that drew heavily on summary notes written by John in 1819 in connection with a course of instruction he had received from his then “schoolmaster.” His father had “expounded each day a portion of the subject, and I gave him next day a written account of it, which he made me [italics added]

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rewrite over and over again until it was clear, precise, and tolerably complete.”56 Apparently the change in regimen coinciding with John’s return home did not include a softening in James Mill’s tone. The younger Mill observes that his father then “made” him “perform an exercise on the manuscript” that involved composing a brief abstract of each paragraph in the margin. Although James Mill doubtless thought this would be a valuable “exercise” for the performer, its primary aim, we are led to infer from his son’s account, was to serve the author of the manuscript, who could thereby “more easily . . . judge of, and improve, the order of the ideas, and the general character of the exposition.”57 James Mill’s penchant for judging, improving, and ordering meant that he would decide the choosing of a livelihood for his eldest son. John’s “calling,” that of Benthamite reformer, could not be expected to provide for his wants. The practice of law, his father surmised in 1821, was perhaps the least objectionable answer to the problem. Bentham, the most comprehensive and acute critic of English law, had himself been called to the bar (not that he could be said to have established much of a practice thereafter). Arrangements were made for John to read Roman law with John Austin during the winter of 1821–22. John and Sarah Austin had moved from Norwich to London following their marriage in 1819, becoming neighbors of Bentham and the Mills in Queen Square Place. An ardent admirer of Bentham’s legal doctrines, Austin at this time was also a keen supporter of Bentham’s radical political program (he would later disavow democratic radicalism). His mind had power and originality—J.S. Mill remarked that Austin “had made Bentham’s best ideas his own, and added much to them from other sources and from his own mind”—and his talk often exhibited an astringent fluency.58 His somber and volatile temperament found expression in both a dogmatic and agitated assertiveness and in episodes of incapacitating despair and lethargy. Austin’s intellect and character made a deep impression on John Mill. “On me his influence was most salutary. It was moral in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind interest in me, far beyond what could have been expected towards a mere youth from a man of his age, standing, and what seemed austerity of character.”59 The strong intellect and amiable personality of Sarah Austin also had an effect on John Mill. Attractive, clever, engaging, and sympathetic, she warmed his existence in ways he would not acknowledge when he came to write his autobiography.60 The Austin household offered consolation to John Mill for having to leave the home of Sir Samuel Bentham and his family and return to that of his father. John Austin accorded the youth a pleasing respect, while

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Sarah Austin showed him great cordiality and affection. John Mill became a favorite with their delightful infant daughter Lucy, to whom he was known as Bun Don (her version of Brother John). He joined the Austins for holidays, which, among other advantages, placed him temporarily beyond the reach of his father. The house occupied by James Mill held for his eldest son troubling associations: a feared parental presence; a mother he could not respect; siblings he had the duty to instruct. Fortunately for John, James Mill approved of the Austins, who were seen as aids rather than obstacles to his son’s intellectual and moral growth (he entrusted his daughters’ lessons to Sarah Austin while John was in France). For John Mill the Austin household was a source of edification, enjoyment, comfort, and encouragement. Reading law with John Austin had a lasting effect on John Mill’s intellectual development; getting to know Charles Austin, John’s younger brother, had an immediate impact on John Mill’s personal development. In the Autobiography Mill says that “at this time and for the next year or two” he “saw much” of Charles Austin. The initial meeting took place in the summer of 1822, when John Mill was on holiday with the Austins in Norwich. John Mill’s senior by seven years, Charles Austin had made a brilliant student career at Cambridge, where his oratorical and conversational power dazzled his contemporaries (Thomas Macaulay included).61 His spellbinding performances at the Cambridge Union gave wide exposure to Benthamite doctrines within the university. Thirty years later J.S. Mill wrote that Charles Austin’s influence at Cambridge “deserves to be accounted an historical event; for to it may be traced the tendency towards Liberalism in general, and the Benthamic and politico-economic form of it in particular, which shewed itself in a portion of the more active-minded young men of the higher classes from this time to 1830.”62 The extraordinary potency of Charles Austin’s personality resonates vividly in an account far removed in time from the events that had introduced him to the young John Mill. The impression he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world . . . He loved to strike, and even to startle. He knew that decision is the greatest element of effect, and he uttered his opinions with all the decision he could throw into them, never so well pleased as when he astonished any one by their audacity. Very unlike his brother, who made war against the narrower interpretations and applications of the principles they both professed, he on the contrary presented the

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Benthamic doctrines in the most startling form of which they were susceptible, exaggerating every thing in them which tended to consequences offensive to any one’s preconceived feelings. All which, he defended with such verve and vivacity, and carried off by a manner so agreeable as well as forcible, that he always either came off victor, or divided the honours of the field.63 Had Charles Austin penned a portrait of the adolescent John Mill, the details would surely have differed from those in the passage above; the trenchancy of the impression made might well have been comparable. Eager to show off this remarkable prodigy to his Cambridge friends, Charles Austin arranged for John to meet T.B. Macaulay, the brothers Hyde and Charles Villiers, Edward Strutt, and John Romilly. All were active in the Cambridge Union, and all, except for Hyde Villiers, who died young, were to play notable parts in Victorian public affairs.64 This marked the first time John Mill was thrown together with a group of worldly and able young men against whom he could measure his own attainments. He found that he could more than hold his own. The regard Charles Austin showed John Mill clearly had a significant effect on the latter. Mill’s Autobiography notes that Charles Austin’s “influence . . . over me differed from that of the other persons I have hitherto mentioned, in being not the influence of a man over a boy, but that of an elder cotemporary. It was through him that I first felt myself, not a pupil under teachers, but a man among men. He was the first person of intellect whom I met on a ground of equality.”65 John Mill had never been a boy among boys; the first experience of feeling himself “a man among men” was unforgettable. His feeling this way, at the age of sixteen, and in such a milieu, shows that his unusual upbringing had not rendered him unfit for satisfying social and intellectual intercourse with those primed to assume places of prominence in the public life of nineteenth-century England. Reconciling life as “a man among men” with life as the eldest son of James Mill would call for the expenditure of much emotional energy over the course of the coming years. For James Mill, John’s legal studies with John Austin served a dual purpose: preparing his son for a possible career at the bar while advancing his education in Benthamism. At the outset of John’s course of instruction with Austin, James Mill placed in his hands the Traité de Législation, “as a needful accompaniment.”66 The reading of this work gave John Mill “a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.” His father is

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given credit for having laid the foundation for his son’s reception of the Traité, but it took Bentham’s treatise to bring “unity” to his “conceptions of things.”67 It was the gospel according to Bentham that became, for a time, his lodestar. The partial transfer of authority from James Mill to Bentham perhaps intensified the exultation John Mill experienced upon reading the Traité. Another aspect of John Mill’s philosophical inheritance assumed a more definite shape soon after his encounter with the Traité. In 1822 his father closely supervised his reading of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations. During the summer of that year James Mill began writing what would become his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, which “carried Hartley’s mode of explaining the mental phenomena to so much greater length and depth.”68 John Mill’s systematic study of “analytic psychology” fixed in his mind the irrefutable authority of the law of association. The experiential school with which he identified rejected the idea that there existed truths outside the mind that could be apprehended by intuition. All knowledge issued from experience. Ideas regarding external objects were formed from “sensations received together so frequently that they coalesce . . . and are spoken of under the idea of unity.”69 The “sensations received” by intuitionists had regrettably duped them into supposing that their ideas corresponded to an innate reality. Many of the sensations reaching the young John Mill had been sent by his father. Associationism’s deterministic streak did not, it seems, cause John problems in 1822, when it can be said his foundational theories— Benthamite utilitarianism in ethics and associationism in psychology— were set in place. For several years thereafter a surge of practical activity absorbed a large portion of his energies and helped ward off the melancholy reflections that would attend his mental crisis. His reliance on his father and Bentham in the realm of theory did not stop John Mill from being a leader of sorts in these years. In late 1822 and early 1823 he started up the Utilitarian Society, which consisted of a small number of young Benthamites who met twice a month at Bentham’s house “to read essays and discuss questions.”70 His coadjutors in this endeavor, Mill notes, were “less advanced” than himself, and he “had considerable influence on their mental progress.”71 In 1824 he was instrumental in the formation of the Society of Students of Mental Philosophy, which focused on philosophical and economic questions. The creation of the London Debating Society in 1825 also owed something to John Mill’s energy and commitment. He played an important

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role in the planning and launching of the Parliamentary History and Review, a short-lived periodical of the mid-1820s that propagated a sectarian Benthamite line on topics taken up by Parliament. Apart from these activities, he was also contributing pieces to the newspapers, writing frequent articles for the Westminster Review (established by Bentham in 1823–24), and editing Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, which appeared in five volumes in 1827. Whatever he might subsequently say about the deficiencies of his education, the young John Mill plainly had a notable capacity for acting on his beliefs.72 In all this there is nothing to suggest that the adolescent John Mill would have shared the view of the mature J.S. Mill that his “own strength lay wholly in the . . . region . . . of theory.”73 The drama and romance of life resided in the sphere of action, a fact the author of the Autobiography makes no attempt to hide when writing of youthful yearnings. These focused on the performance of great acts meriting public acclaim and gratitude. In the early 1820s, not long after his return from France, John Mill developed a keen interest in the history of the French Revolution. Having had but a sketchy knowledge of the subject before this time, he “learnt with astonishment, that the principles of democracy, then apparently in so insignificant and hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had borne all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had been the creed of the nation.” This discovery carried a distinct emotional impact: “the subject took an immense hold of my feelings. It allied itself with all my juvenile aspirations to the character of a democratic champion. What happened so lately, seemed as if it might easily happen again; and the most transcendant [sic] glory I was capable of conceiving, was that of figuring, successful or unsuccessful, as a Girondist in an English Convention.”74 The exemplary status assigned the Girondists by the youthful John Mill had no place in the lessons he learned from his father. The post1792 reaction in England against the French Revolution was of such intensity that a defense of the ineffectual political rivals of the Jacobins had nothing to recommend it. For most of the decade following John Mill’s birth, the United Kingdom was at war with an immensely powerful Napoleonic France. Bonaparte’s rise, as understood in England, had been made possible by a revolution destined to bring destruction in its wake. Albeit lacking the zealotry of the Jacobins, the Girondists nonetheless were easily blackened with the republican brush. A person seeking to acquire a measure of influence in England during the early decades of the nineteenth century would be well-advised to say nothing in favor of any kind of revolutionary. In his early years in London James

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Mill himself had written articles for the Anti-Jacobin Review. His subsequent political radicalism had no use for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, whose language, from a Benthamite perspective, seemed riddled with fallacies. With the restoration of the Bourbons, James Mill entertained the idea of moving his large family to France owing to its relative cheapness. To his friend Francis Place he wrote: “I foresee nothing there which would make it uncomfortable for us to reside as soon as we please. Assure yourself that the French people will soon be very quiet & contented slaves, & the despotism of the Bourbons a quiet, gentle despotism.”75 After his stay with the family of Samuel Bentham, and his exposure to the history of the French Revolution, the one thing that could make France an unendurable place for John Mill to reside would be a conviction that the French people had become “quiet & contented slaves.”76 The emphasis given analysis in his early education had clearly not crippled John Mill’s imaginative faculties. The renown he wished to win from acting the part of a Girondist in an “English Convention” signals an appetite for heroic conduct and an eagerness to visualize the circumstances summoning this heroism. Although a mature J.S. Mill situated this longing within a congeries of “juvenile aspirations,” more than a trace of such enthusiasms can be detected decades after he had left childhood behind. For all James Mill’s detestation of aristocratic government, for all his investment in training his eldest son to become a benefactor of mankind, the idea of John Mill’s participation as a Girondist in an “English Convention” is one he did not reckon with. Reading the history of the French Revolution fired the younger Mill’s imagination and aroused a powerful emotional response in one who aspired to distinguish himself in the sphere of action no less than that of thought. Nothing in this history, regrettably, could illustrate the effective coupling of theory and practice, and James Mill had no reason to direct his son toward the French Revolution with a view to supplying him with a positive object lesson. For an exemplary illustration of the integration of thought and action, both Mills looked not to eighteenthcentury France but to ancient Greece. In his 1832 essay “On Genius,” John Mill purports to describe this special historical moment. The studies of the closet were combined with, and were intended as a preparation for, the pursuits of active life. There was no litterature des salons, no dilettantism in ancient Greece: wisdom was not something to be prattled about, but something to be done. It was this which, during the bright days of Greece, prevented theory

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from degenerating into vain and idle refinements, and produced that rare combination which distinguishes the great minds of that glorious people,—of profound speculation, and business-like matter-of-fact common sense . . . Bred to action, passing their lives in the midst of it, all the speculations of the Greeks were for the sake of action, all their conceptions of excellence had a direct reference to it.77 This passage may reveal less about the ancient Greeks that it does about John Mill’s education and sensibility. In the early 1820s, unlike the early 1830s, he could not be said to have “speculations” that were entirely his own. His imagination, even then, he did own, and his Girondist fantasy shows he wanted what he had learned to be “for the sake of action.” * * * In 1823 James Mill moved to secure his son’s future material well-being. Within four years of his appointment in 1819 as one of three Assistants in the Examiner’s Office of the East India Company, James Mill had achieved a position in the Office second only to that of the Examiner himself. By April of 1823 his annual salary stood at a handsome £1200. His influence was such that in the following month he was able to obtain for his eldest son a junior clerkship in the Examiner’s Office. The terms of this appointment stipulated that John Mill was to receive no salary during his first three years of service (the Company expressed its token appreciation in the form of an annual gratuity of £30). His initial appointment differed from that of other junior clerks in one important respect. He was to work under the supervision of his father and to be “employed from the beginning in preparing drafts of dispatches, and be thus trained as a successor to those who then filled the higher departments of the office.”78 James Mill was understandably pleased. The day after his son’s appointment he wrote to his friend Dr. Thomas Thomson (author of A System of Chemistry): “The court of Directors have . . . appointed John . . . on a footing on which he will in all probability be in the receipt of a larger income at an early age than he would in any profession; and as he can still keep his hours as a student of law, his way to the legal profession is not barred, if he should afterwards prefer it.”79 James Mill here seems ready to allow that the time might come when his son’s preference, rather than his own, should determine John’s career path. Yet this was more a concession in form than in substance. Employment at India House promised a degree of economic security

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that neither the law nor any other profession could assure. The fact that such employment did not rule out preparation for entry into the legal profession made it appear that the father had not irrevocably decided his son’s career track. Suppose such employment had been thought incompatible with training for the bar—would James Mill then have kept his son away from India House? No. Would John Mill have refused to cooperate with his father had he concluded that in accepting a junior clerkship in the Examiner’s Office he would thereby foreclose the prospect of a legal career? No. The East India Company had given James Mill the opportunity to gain a comfortable living while working to improve the quality of British governance in India. Placing a high value on his services, the Court of Directors had rewarded him accordingly. He had every expectation that his son would be treated with the same consideration. In theory John Mill’s move into India House did not end the possibility of his qualifying for a career at the bar; in effect a decision had been made that a compliant John Mill would have to live with. The somewhat perfunctory discussion in the Autobiography of his thirtyfive year India House career indicates that it was not hard to live with; indeed, this discussion tends to confirm the wisdom of his father’s judgment. Here J.S. Mill says that service in the East India Company “gained” him a “subsistence,” which is to understate the case.80 In 1825 he received a gratuity of £100, a figure that in the following year rose to £200; his appointment in 1828 to the position of Fourth Assistant to the Examiner gave him an annual salary of £310 (in 1828 John Mill was twenty-two years of age); his appointment as First Assistant in 1836 raised his remuneration to £1200 per annum.81 He had a ready aptitude for the work, which generally stimulated his mind without taxing it. The job amply met his material wants without frustrating his wish “to devote a part of the twenty-four hours to private intellectual pursuits.”82 His duties, he remarks in a passage that his wife persuaded him to remove from the text, “occupied fewer hours of the day than almost any business or profession . . . had nothing in them to produce anxiety, or to keep the mind intent on them at any time but when directly engaged in them.”83 (Mill does not feel called upon to tell his readers that a large portion of both A System of Logic and The Principles of Political Economy was written at India House on India House stationery.) The experience gained from execution of his official responsibilities, he observes, also taught him much about the opportunities and constraints inherent in the “practical conduct of public affairs.” What he learned at India House apropos of the conditions bearing upon the transaction of public business proved valuable to a “theoretical reformer of the opinions and institutions” of his age.84

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Mill acknowledges that his position in the East India Company had “drawbacks, for every mode of life has its drawbacks.” If it chimed well with “private intellectual pursuits,” the same could not be said for its harmony with public political pursuits. Those who answered to the Court of Directors of the East India Company were not eligible for a seat in Parliament, an “exclusion,” Mill says in the Autobiography, to which he “was not indifferent.”85 The restrictions on public forms of political participation did not end there. When Bentham acted in 1823 to fund the creation of a radical organ to rival the influence of the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review, he apparently did not grasp that James Mill’s employment at India House disqualified him from the editorship of the new periodical. According to John Mill, Bentham made the offer, which the elder Mill had to refuse.86 The seventeen-year-old who became an apprentice to his father in the Examiner’s Office in 1823 knew that certain ambitions of a political character could not be reconciled with service in the East India Company. Whether he accepted, at this juncture, that a definitive choice had been made about his future employment is not knowable. Probably he did not seriously ponder the matter during the early years of his service. He no doubt took it for granted that the official work done by his father was work of some consequence. He understood that he was being trained to perform the tasks his father performed, and that he alone of the junior clerks appointed at this time was being so trained. The arrangement signified James Mill’s confidence that his son could acquit himself well in the company of experienced men accustomed to discharging official functions. Awareness of this unusual status may well have been a source of satisfaction to John. His commitments at India House in the early and mid-1820s plainly did not interfere with his taking on myriad projects in which he was keenly interested and that had no connection with his place of employment. Who could tell what exploitable opportunities might yet present themselves to a young man of such outstanding ability and grand ambition? The challenge was to think in such terms while handling the continued dominion of his father, the father to whom he owed so much. For John Mill the chief immediate “drawback” to his assuming a place at India House was that it expanded his father’s direct jurisdiction over him. From this jurisdiction he had been temporarily liberated during his stay in France. Once back in England he had of course returned to his father’s house. James Mill’s India House responsibilities, however, now kept him away from home many hours each week, and his son, although

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expected to give instruction to his siblings, had a good deal more control over his time, and space, than had been the case before he left for France. With his appointment at India House in 1823, that control was in some considerable measure reduced. The strain arising from this change was evidently not compounded by any expression of displeasure on James Mill’s part regarding the quality of his son’s work at India House. The younger Mill gave repeated demonstration of an intellectual maturity well beyond his years. More was not asked of him than he was able to deliver. That he met the expectations of the person to whom he was most accountable, and earned the respect of all those who reviewed his work, is implicit in what he says in the Autobiography. “My drafts of course required, for some time, much revision from immediate superiors, but I soon became well acquainted with the business, and by my father’s instructions and the general growth of my own powers, I was in a few years qualified to be, and practically was, the chief conductor of the correspondence with India in one of the leading departments, that of the Native States.”87 James Mill’s position within the East India Company helped make possible his son’s rapid rise; John’s performance made a reality of that possibility. * * * John Mill’s opportunities to exercise his exceptional abilities at this time were not confined to the offices of the East India Company. The manifold activities he then engaged in—the discussion groups and debating societies, the contributions to radical newspapers and periodicals, the editing of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence—provided outlets for his emergent aspirations to participate vigorously in “the march of mind,” a march both father and son were eager to press forward. The manner and substance of John Mill’s early journalism and debating speeches abundantly display the attitudes, assumptions, and governing ideas of his mentors. Be the subject human nature, the proper mode of reasoning, political institutions and representation, the deformities of the legal system, freedom of the press, religious persecution, the pernicious influence of “sinister interests” (the aristocracy in particular), the deficiencies of the universities, or the tenets of political economy, the treatment given by the adolescent Mill was fully in accord with the doctrines propagated by his father and Jeremy Bentham.88 In the opinions he expresses he appears to have complete confidence; in the tone, the example of Charles Austin is often discernible. “Judges, like other

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men, will always prefer themselves to their neighbours. Judges, like other men, will indulge their indolence and satiate their rapacity whenever they can do it without fear of detection.”89 What John Mill said and did in the five years after his return from France shows no sign of dissatisfaction with the intellectual edifice constructed by Bentham and his father. The young man’s search for companionship among his peers did, however, create tensions with his father. James Mill had striven to control his eldest son’s social contacts. In the early 1820s this became increasingly difficult. As already noted, the decision to have John Mill pursue legal studies under John Austin had led to his acquaintance with Charles Austin and his Cambridge friends. These men were some years older than John Mill, and their circumstances were unlikely to bring them into close association with him (although he may have seen “much” of Charles Austin for a “year or two” during the early 1820s, nothing Mill says in the Autobiography implies that they became “friends” in any meaningful sense). The case of John Arthur Roebuck was altogether different. The death of Roebuck’s father, an Indian civil servant, had been followed by the family’s move to Canada, where Roebuck had been raised. Arriving in England in 1824 to study for the bar, the twenty-two-year-old Roebuck looked up Thomas Love Peacock, with whom the family had a connection. Peacock was an Assistant Examiner at India House, and he directly introduced Roebuck to the younger Mill. They struck up a fast friendship. Possessing a strong mind but little formal education, Roebuck was inducted into Philosophic Radicalism by John Mill.90 Another young man who had fallen under John Mill’s sway was George John Graham, a member of the Utilitarian Society formed in 1822–23. Graham too became close to Roebuck, and both would routinely accompany Mill on his morning walk to India House.91 When John Mill brought Roebuck and Graham for a Sunday visit to Dorking, where James Mill rented a house for several months each year, his father took no trouble to conceal his dislike for his son’s companions. He had words with Roebuck, a combative personality with a large ego and immense self-confidence. Roebuck and Graham returned to London on Monday morning, John briefly remaining behind to express his displeasure with his father’s conduct. Upon “next seeing his friends, he told them what happened between him and his father; he had, he said, ‘vindicated his position.’ ” According to Alexander Bain, the “scene left a great impression in the family.”92 John Mill kept up his friendship with Roebuck and Graham, but he did not again take them where they clearly were not welcome.93

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The extraordinary nature of this incident naturally produced a lasting impression on those who experienced it, including all members of the Mill household. It marks the first reported instance of John Mill’s openly challenging the judgment and behavior of his father. In defense of friendships he valued, and as a matter of personal honor, John Mill stood up to his father, an act requiring no small amount of courage. He did so because he had to show himself and his two friends that he was “a man among men,” even if this entailed a quarrel with his father. The first reported instance of such frank opposition would also be the last. * * * We know of Mill’s mental crisis from one source only, the Autobiography. No documents contemporary with the crisis attest to its existence. If friends or family noticed anything odd, they made no mention of it in any written form that has survived. Mill states that there was no one in whom he could confide, and implies that his demeanor would not have alerted those around him to his predicament. “During this time [the winter of 1826–27] I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit.”94 Mill depicts the crisis in the pivotal chapter of the Autobiography, titled “A Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward.” In Mill’s account the crisis ushered in a critical stage in his emotional and intellectual development. Although a number of elements define this new stage, its most salient feature is that John Mill, not James Mill, became the directing force. The passage describing the onset of Mill’s depression is among the best known in the literature of nineteenth-century autobiography. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.” In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to

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have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.95 Mill says there was nothing notable about the “dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to.” What made a commonplace depression a crisis with profound repercussions was his posing of the question and the nature of the answer that followed from it. Both Alexander Bain and Leslie Stephen, among the first to comment on the mental crisis in the context of a biographical treatment of J.S. Mill, find the explanation for the depression in the effects of “overwork.” Later commentators, whatever position they adopt on the core causes of the crisis, generally concede that such effects made Mill more susceptible to low spirits in the autumn of 1826 than he might otherwise have been. His activities in 1825–26 were enough to tire the most resourceful of young men. The editing of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, from a disorderly series of manuscripts legible only to the most practiced eye, alone was a task of gigantic proportions.96 The strain of such labors may have rendered Mill more vulnerable to a depression whose initial characteristics were perfectly ordinary; it cannot explain why a transfiguring crisis ensued. The significance of Mill’s strenuous efforts during the months preceding his mental turmoil had less to do with fatigue than with a rising awareness of his altered relation to his father. John Mill began to sense in the autumn of 1826 that the man from whom he had learned so much had little left to teach him. By this time the younger Mill had proven himself at India House. His appointment as a salaried clerk had been approved in May 1826. Even before this happened he had been moved to the newly established Correspondence Branch, and it had “become obvious to his clerical colleagues that the young man’s promotion over their heads to the Examiner class in the Correspondence Branch was only a matter of time.”97 He had completed the editing of Bentham’s Rationale, the five hefty volumes of which were making their way through the press. Especially noteworthy is what John Mill says in the Autobiography about the articles he wrote for the Parliamentary History and Review in 1825 and 1826. The topics he addressed—Catholic disabilities and the suppression of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association, the commercial crash of 1825–26, and the principle of reciprocity in international trade—derived from the issues of the day taken up by Parliament. They did not spring from the head of James Mill. His essays for the Parliamentary History and Review, John Mill observes, “were no

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longer mere reproductions and applications of the doctrines I had been taught; they were original thinking, as far as that name can be applied to old ideas in new forms and connexions: and I do not exceed the truth in saying that there was a maturity, and a well-digested character about them, which there had not been in any of my previous performances.”98 By the autumn of 1826 John Mill had learned how to function as a powerful and independent intellectual agent. On this score he had no further need of his father. Not only could James Mill not provide what his eldest son still did need, a centered and vibrant emotional life, but his treatment of his son had hampered the formation of such a life. John Mill’s mental crisis stands as a kind of ritual marking of his separation from his father and his embarking upon a new internal course of his own devising. Its emblematic status is implicit in the Autobiography. Explaining why he could not turn to his father for help, he says that his education had been “wholly” the work of James Mill, who had “conducted” it “without regard to the possibility of its ending in this result”; the predicament in which he now found himself was “beyond the power of his [James Mill’s] remedies.”99 The training he had received from his father had given disproportionate attention to the expansion of his analytical powers while neglecting his affective endowments. Essential as analysis was to the discovery of truth, its habitual exercise, when coupled with the habitual slighting of other mental faculties, tends “to wear away the feelings.”100 His education had taught him to associate pleasure with the promoting of the general interest, and pain with the thwarting of that interest. It had not given him the means to build an emotional investment in the moral ends his reason had been schooled to fix upon. When his sagging spirits led him to ask what these ends meant to him, the answer made him desolate. With misery, however, also came some understanding of his plight. The antidote to despair would have to be found within himself. Much has understandably been made of the event to which John Mill ascribed the beginning of his escape from this wretchedness. While reading, “accidentally” he says, Marmontel’s Memoirs, he “came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost.” He wept. “From this moment my burthen grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made.”101 Although John Mill held a

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kind of copyright on the presentation of his mental crisis, this aspect of his presentation unwittingly handed twentieth-century commentators with a psychoanalytical bent the key to deciphering it.102 The nub of the crisis was the son’s wish for the father’s annihilation. Such an interpretation oversimplifies the complex cluster of feelings the younger Mill had for his father. Allowing that a sublimated desire for James Mill’s final exit may well have been in play, it is nonetheless rash to give this desire precedence in an understanding of the mental crisis. The jumble of sentiments his father engendered in John Mill should caution against such a reductive explanation. If much is to be made of his account of the scene in Marmontel’s Memoirs that inaugurated the recovery phase of the crisis, the profound sense of loss attendant upon the father’s death should not be overlooked. A revival of feeling, in John Mill’s case, was likely to be linked with the representation of strong personal feeling on the printed page. The “death-wish” strand should not be isolated from the tangled skein of emotions responsible for his sympathetic identification with the boy and his family. In 1826 John Mill was no longer “a mere boy.” He was an accomplished young man who had become acutely aware that his own life’s plan had hitherto been devised by his father. His father’s “plan”—one that neither John Mill nor any other child could possibly have formed for himself—had in most respects proved notably satisfactory. Its inadequacy did not lie in its observable attributes: the rigorous intellectual training, the apprenticeship in utilitarian radicalism, the position at India House. For all this, John Mill had cause to be grateful, and grateful he was. What the plan lacked was provision for an internal culture of the “feelings.” The problem faced by the younger Mill in 1826 involved what to make of what he had been given, and how to give himself the emotional nourishment his father had failed to supply. Answering the latter challenge could go some way toward answering the former. His task was to complement and complete the superb, and indispensable, analytical education he had received. Between what he had been taught, and what he could teach himself by tilling an internal region to which James Mill had no access, he could create something valuable of his own. This undertaking would constitute an assertion of independence, even if his father could not be expected to grasp that such an assertion was being made. If John Mill was to go on with his life, this was the only helpful course open to him. James Mill retained a commanding presence in a large part of the physical space occupied by his son. Circumstances and temperament conspired to enforce upon John Mill a reticence that itself was symptomatic of his predicament. Without confronting his father

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directly, John would claim the measure of autonomy he needed by embarking on a quiet and intensive program of self-cultivation. In the Autobiography Mill characterizes this program as one of the two far-reaching effects of the mental crisis and its resolution. He speaks of “the internal culture of the individual,” of “the cultivation of the feelings,” which he now saw as “one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”103 The experience of reading Wordsworth’s poems figures significantly in Mill’s account of his recovery. For him they embodied “the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings.”104 To what extent had Mill’s education impeded the emergence of an “internal culture” of the kind he extols here? He gives the impression that before his descent into depression he had assigned “almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and action.”105 His own training had indisputably placed a premium on inquiry, analysis, and action. This is not to say, however, that it failed to make room for anything else. Leaving aside the numerous histories and travel literature that had stimulated his youthful imagination, he had also read the following before his eighth birthday: Robinson Crusoe, Edward Forster’s translation of the Arabian Nights, Jacques Cazotte’s translation of Arabian Tales, Tobias Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales. Some of these works James Mill had borrowed for his eldest son’s entertainment. His “father’s system,” J.S. Mill notes in the Autobiography, did not “exclude books of amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly.”106 The mature John Mill had no reason to see his reading of such books as helping to prepare the way for his embrace of Wordsworth. Yet we should be wary of the idea that his training had stifled his imagination, especially in light of the vivacity of his response to the ancients, to historical literature, to France and the French Revolution, to music (“the only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure”), and to natural landscapes.107 As for the last, he says explicitly that “the power of rural beauty over me” had created the groundwork for the pleasure he discovered in Wordsworth’s poetry.108 The sensibility that predisposed John Mill to find solace where he did, while not deliberately fostered by his father, had evolved contemporaneously with the education he had received from James Mill. He now considered a policy of internal culture essential to his well-being, and the crystallizing of this conviction no doubt did constitute an important change.

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The other major change arising from this period of self-examination, we learn from the Autobiography, was John Mill’s realization that the pursuit of personal happiness was incompatible with its attainment. Enjoyment could be derived from the passing pleasures life offers, but to make such enjoyment the predominant purpose of life was self-defeating. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance [for happiness] is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.”109 The external ends he mentions, by way of example, are “the happiness of others,” “the improvement of mankind,” and an “art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.”110 At least the second of these examples would almost certainly have been on James Mill’s list as well, and if John Mill ever believed that a quest for personal happiness could yield satisfactory results he could not have got this notion from a father who “had . . . scarcely any belief in pleasure.”111 The seasoned J.S. Mill says that he “never . . . wavered in his conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life.”112 Of his father’s moral standard, he had said much the same thing.113 Although the “theory of life” John Mill now adopted avidly accommodated pursuits less austere than those valued by James Mill, the foundational elements of the theory were rooted in his education. Unlike the above investigation of John Mill’s mental crisis, his own commentary on the episode makes scant reference to his father. The education is there; the educator is largely absent. At its heart this experience was a self-enactment that disclosed John Mill’s beliefs about himself. It could not be “shared” with James Mill, for it belonged entirely to the son, who now claimed sole responsibility for what he was to become.

CHAPTER

TWO

Gathering Truths, 1826–30

As John Mill emerged from the worst of his mental crisis, he embarked on a search to discover truths that his education had failed to disclose. He sought to broaden the scope of his intellectual and emotional sympathies and to deepen their imprint upon his being. To this undertaking he brought several important advantages, not all of which he necessarily recognized. Endowed with a spacious, supple, and prodigiously powerful mind, John Mill had experienced an education that furnished him with a rich store of knowledge on an impressive range of subjects. To this knowledge was joined a command and appreciation of ordering principles that helped give shape and method to his quest. Moreover, his internal ordeal of 1826–27 forced him to confront his shortcomings and produced a vow to rectify them. And this was not all. John Mill had a secure position at India House, one that afforded him ample opportunity to pursue his program of internal culture without undue distraction. Whatever anxieties continued to beset him, they should not have arisen from concern for his present or future material well-being. As for the prospects of enriching the content of his emotional life, they were favorable. Cultivating the sympathies comes more easily when one is the object of others’ affection and sympathy. John Mill found such affection and sympathy in a number of quarters. For the gathering of truths—about the world and about himself—he was favorably situated. * * * The physical realities of John Mill’s existence in the late 1820s were, in the main, benign. By this time James Mill’s family enjoyed a notable measure of material comfort. When appointed Assistant Examiner in

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April 1823, the elder Mill’s annual salary rose to £1200. When the younger Mill became Fourth Assistant to the Examiner, in February 1828, his starting salary, not including gratuities, was £310. A family income of this size placed the Mills firmly within the ranks of the upper middle classes. The wartime income tax introduced by William Pitt in 1799, from which the laboring poor were meant to be excluded, did not apply to incomes below £60; a revision of 1806 reduced the base limit to £50. Skilled London craftsmen, and constables in the Metropolitan Police Force created by Robert Peel in 1829, could expect to earn this much. Although a modicum of material well-being could be supported on £50 a year, comfort of a more substantial sort usually presupposed an income of £100 or higher. For the year 1815 some 160,000 persons were charged under Schedule D, which pertained to income derived from trade, industry, and professional activity. Nearly 60 percent of these reported incomes of less than £100. Only 12 percent reported incomes of £300 or more. Fewer than 5000 individuals reported incomes above £1000.1 Before the end of 1830 James Mill’s annual salary stood at £1900 (in this year he was promoted to Examiner). Upon this salary no direct tax was imposed, the income tax having been repealed by Parliament in 1816 (it would not be reintroduced until 1842, six years after James Mill’s death). An income of £1900 exceeded the annual rentals collected by a significant portion of England’s landed gentry.2 Ultimately, James Mill had made very handsome provision for himself and his family. The Mills retained their residence in Queen Square until the spring of 1831, when James Mill moved his family to Vicarage Place, Church Street, Kensington, to occupy a large detached villa. Three years before this move James Mill had acquired a summer residence at Mickleham in Surrey, a three-hour coach journey from London. Thomas Carlyle, who paid a visit to his friend John Mill when the latter was at Mickleham, liked the environs and the house. “It is a pretty country, a pretty village, of the English straggling wooded sort: the Mills have joined some ‘old Carpenter’s-shops’ together, and made a pleasant summer mansion (connected by shed-roofed passages), the little drawing-room door of glass looking out into a rose-lawn, into green plains, and half-a-mile off to a most respectable wooded-and-open broad-shouldered Green Hill.”3 Although he had an income sufficient for independence, John Mill continued to live at home with his parents and siblings, the education of the latter remaining his responsibility. His practical domestic needs were largely met by others—his mother, assisted by her older daughters, and the Mills’ household servants. In a material sense, he lacked for nothing.

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His place of occupation provided a generally congenial setting for labors not excessively taxing. The East India House, a splendid stately structure with grand Doric columns, had been rebuilt by the proprietors of the Company during the late 1790s. It stood majestically in Leadenhall Street in the City. True, James Mill had a magisterial presence at India House, not an unmixed blessing to the younger Mill. In a practical sense, however, the father’s expertise helped the son acquire, in fairly short order, a self-directed proficiency over the business that came his way. John Mill’s demonstrable ability won him promotion to the rank of Assistant to the Examiner in 1828. The income and way of life of James and John Stuart Mill indicate they belonged to the upper portion of the “middle rank” of English society. Yet their incomes had no direct connection with either the established professions of early-nineteenth-century England—the church, the officer class of the army and navy, the law, and medicine— or with the worlds of commerce, investment, and industry (the empire of the East India Company had as much to do with conquest and control of land revenue as with anything resembling conventional commercial activity). Their positions at India House, practically unaffected by market forces, insulated the Mills from the acutely competitive and precarious universe in which most members of the English middle classes dwelt. W.J. Fox, a prominent Unitarian minister, radical journalist, and editor, stated in 1835: “in the middle classes we note an almost universal unfixedness of position. Every man is rising or falling or hoping that he shall rise, or fearing that he shall sink.”4 Five years later John Mill himself noted the “entire unfixedness in the social position of individuals” within England’s middle classes, citing “that treading upon the heels of one another—that habitual dissatisfaction of each with the position he occupies, and eager desire to push himself into the next above it.”5 At one time “unfixedness” had been the lot of James Mill, but not after 1819 and his appointment at India House. John Mill was spared the struggle his father had endured. The status and security he enjoyed by virtue of the service he gave the East India Company did not prevent John Mill from striving to do great things. They allowed him to focus this striving outside the economic arena. John Mill had no more reason to feel insecure about his personal attributes than he did about his professional circumstances. His bodily constitution, if not especially robust, had the soundness necessary to sustain good health during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Nothing suggests he was at all vain about his person, yet he had no need to worry that others would be put off by his presence. Above average in height, slim,

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fair-haired, ruddy-complexioned, and possessing an attractive face, Mill’s form and features made a vivid and pleasing impression. Thomas Carlyle first met Mill in early September 1831, and soon after told his wife Jane of this “slender rather tall and elegant youth.”6 Caroline Fox, member of a notable Quaker family, first saw John Mill in March 1840, by which time he had aged noticeably; she found “his exquisitely chiseled countenance . . . beautiful and refined.”7 Henry Taylor, a contemporary of the younger Mill and a fellow-member of the London Debating Society, described his manners as “plain, neither graceful nor awkward; his features refined and regular; the eyes small relatively to the scale of the face, the jaw large, the nose straight and finely shaped, the lips thin and compressed, the forehead and head capacious; and both face and body seemed to represent outwardly the inflexibility of the inner man.”8 Good as it was for the purposes required of it, Mill’s body did not perform most physical tasks with ease. He himself noted that he never got over being “inexpert in anything requiring manual dexterity.”9 This clumsiness did not, however, interfere with his passion for walking, and his way of life was such that it did not prove a serious liability. This attractive young man had companions with whom to walk and talk. People liked John Mill, and he showed a sociable disposition in these years. His father did not see much of this geniality, but other family members evidently did. In 1830 James Mill’s second son, James Bentham Mill (born 1814) entered University College, London. A classmate, Henry Solly, spent a week with the family at their Surrey cottage. After John Mill’s death, Solly wrote up his impressions of this visit in two separate accounts. In one of these he remarked on “the affectionate playfulness” of John Mill’s “character as a brother in the company of his sisters, and of the numerous younger branches of the family.”10 In the other he noted: “John Mill always seemed to me a great favourite with his family. He was evidently very fond of his mother and sisters, and they of him; and he frequently manifested a sunny brightness and gaiety of heart and behaviour which were singularly fascinating.”11 John Mill’s sociability extended well beyond the domestic sphere. He frequently joined other guests at weekly breakfasts hosted by Henry Taylor (habitual attendees included Charles Austin, John Romilly, Edward Strutt, and Charles Villiers).12 In his Autobiography Taylor wistfully recalled that these gatherings, which began at ten o’clock, sometimes did not end before three.13 On 15 November 1830 Charles Greville, clerk to the privy council—and the most penetrating political diarist of his age—met John Mill, among others, at one of Taylor’s

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breakfasts. “Young Mill,” he recorded in his diary, “is Son of Mill who wrote the ‘History of British India,’ and said to be cleverer than his father. He has written many excellent articles in reviews, pamphlets, etc., but though powerful with a pen in his hand, in conversation he has not the art of managing his ideas, and is consequently hesitating and slow, and has the appearance of being always working in his mind a proposition or syllogism.”14 The Mill Alexander Bain came to know in the early 1840s had a conversational efficiency unnoticed by Greville. Bain affirmed that Mill “always aimed at saying the right thing clearly and shortly. He was perfectly fluent, but yet would pause for an instant to get the best word, or the neatest collocation: and he always liked to finish with an epigrammatic turn.”15 Carlyle met Mill less than a year after the repast at Taylor’s to which Greville referred. In a letter to his wife, Carlyle spoke of Mill’s remarkable gifts and “precision of utterance.”16 Henry Taylor himself implied that Mill held his own during the breakfast attended by Greville, which also included the Tory poet Robert Southey. Taylor alluded to the “odd assemblage” in a letter written the following day: “There were Southey and Mill, as far as the poles asunder in politics, but somewhat akin in morals and habits of literary industry.” All members of the party, he observed, “talked copiously and well.”17 John Mill’s pen being more forceful than his tongue did not keep Taylor from seeing the power in both.18 Another “Henry” saw a lot of Mill in the late 1820s. Henry Cole, Mill’s junior by two years, lived with his father in a house that belonged to Thomas Love Peacock, James Mill’s colleague (and a comic novelist of note). On 7 November 1826 Peacock brought Cole and Mill together. The entry in Cole’s diary for this date tersely states: “Introduced by Mr. Peacock to Mr. John Mill.”19 Thereafter Cole subscribed to the London Debating Society and sometimes joined Mill, Roebuck, and Graham in the small discussion group that met twice a week at the home of George and Harriet Grote in Threadneedle Street. Cole often stopped in at India House to visit Peacock, Horace Grant, and John Mill before moving on to the Tower of London, where he carried out duties connected with his post on the Records Commission.20 A number of autumn evenings in 1828 found Cole taking tea with John Mill in Queen Square. On 4 September of this year Mill showed Cole his collection of “Botanical Specimens,” a number of which he presented to his friend as a gift.21 Cole graduated from plants to people on 19 November, when he was introduced to Mill’s “Mother & Sisters— without prejudice & agreably [sic] well educated personages.”22 Agreeable as John Mill might have found the company of his mother

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and sisters during these years, they could not compete with a flower he unexpectedly encountered in June 1830. Cole’s diary recorded his friend’s rapture: “Called on John Mill who was exulting in his discovery of the Martigon Lily at Dorking.”23 The friendship of Cole and Mill encompassed conversation, tea, flora, walks, and music. Mill mentioned, in an early version of the “Early Draft,” that in late winter and early spring he would, weather permitting, “make a walking excursion with some of the young men who were my companions; generally walking out ten or twelve miles to breakfast, and making a circuit of fourteen or fifteen more before getting back to town.”24 Cole was one of these “young men,” his diary for 1829 offering some particulars regarding these Sunday outings. On 19 April, for example, Cole “Walked with John Mill and Grant [Horace Grant, Mill’s colleague and friend at India House] to Locks Bottom to Breakfast thro’ Sydenham and Bromley, and retd [returned] by Orpington, Cheselhurst, & Sydenham.”25 The more Cole saw of Mill, the more he valued his friendship. In early February 1830, he noted in his diary: “Mill drank tea and passed the Evg with me. The admiration & esteem for his talents encreases [sic] each time that I have the pleasure of seeing him.”26 In the early 1830s Cole had a connection with two Millian walking tours—in Yorkshire and the Lake District for a month in the summer of 1831 (during which Mill visited Wordsworth), and in Hampshire, West Sussex, and the Isle of Wight for more than a fortnight in the summer following.27 A shared enthusiasm for music also brought the two young men together. John Mill, a skillful amateur pianist who enjoyed playing the compositions of others and his own, found a musical companion in Cole. On Tuesday, 14 June 1831, “early in the morning,” Mill called on Cole “to converse about Harmony.” On Wednesday evening, 30 November 1831, Mill drank tea with Cole and “played a vast quantity of music from memory.” Mill and Cole also attended the opera together. Mill continued to be on cordial terms with many whose acquaintance he had made years earlier. Of those older than himself, the Grotes and the Austins retained a conspicuous place. In a personal sense, John Mill certainly felt closer to the Austins (their daughter Lucy included), whose company he would experience in a more intimate setting than that supplied by the Grotes. If he nonetheless saw the Grotes more often than he saw the Austins, this was simply because George Grote (a prosperous banker) had the resources, and Harriet Grote the inclination, to make their home a political and intellectual center for young radicals of a philosophic bent. The Austins manifestly lacked the means to act in this capacity during the late 1820s, years when they had to practice “the

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most rigid economy.”28 (Years later Sarah Austin became a notable literary hostess; her reclusive husband never took to the part of host.) During the second half of the 1820s the Grotes’ residence served as the meeting place for the discussion group led by John Mill. Its members included Roebuck and G.J. Graham. Although the closeness he had felt with Roebuck in the mid-1820s had lessened by the end of the decade, John Mill certainly still considered him a “friend.” Mill rated Graham’s intellectual force above that of Roebuck, later describing Graham as “a thinker of originality and power on almost all abstract subjects.”29 Graham sometimes accompanied Mill on his Sunday walks. Another contemporary Mill had known for some years, William Eyton Tooke, retained a place in his life in the late 1820s. Mill’s Autobiography mentions Tooke several times: as “a young man of singular worth both moral and intellectual”; as an early contributor to the Westminster Review; as an agent in the spread of James Mill’s influence among the generation of Cambridge undergraduates that followed Charles Austin’s; and as the person through whom John Mill became acquainted with F.D. Maurice.30 Mill’s affectionate solicitude for Eyton Tooke comes through in a letter he wrote to the Grotes on September 1, 1824, a few days after he had been a dinner guest at the Wimbledon home of Thomas Tooke, Eyton’s father. John Mill reported that Mr. Tooke had taken strong exception to some of the views expressed by his son during a lengthy discussion of economic questions. “Two or three times he put him down with considerable harshness,” Mill observed. These “reproofs,” Mill continued, the younger Tooke accepted “with the most infidel charity & resignation. I contrived, towards the close of the evening to take a turn with Eyton in the garden, and we had some very profitable conversation: he is eager to do whatever good he can, & to qualify himself for doing more.”31 Mill kept up his strong friendship with Tooke through the second half of the 1820s. The social ties Mill maintained with such contemporaries as Tooke, Graham, Roebuck, Grant, Cole, and Taylor refreshed his spirits and exercised his sympathies. They gave to his routines a salutary balance and made him know that others valued his companionship. Missing, however, was a conviction that he could learn much from these young men. He liked and respected them (of Tooke he was especially fond), but did not find in any of them a mental power comparable to his own. They could not aid his on-going reappraisal of his intellectual heritage. In the mid-1820s he met two men who did make a significant contribution to this reassessment, Frederick Denison Maurice and John Sterling. Mill met Maurice through Eyton Tooke, who had been at Cambridge during Maurice’s years there. Maurice and Sterling drew

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close while at university, where both men had made names for themselves at the Cambridge Union and become early members of the “Apostles,” a small coterie of intellectually gifted and morally earnest undergraduates. Like Tooke, Maurice and Sterling were almost exact contemporaries of John Mill. From 1827 to 1829, they brought to the London Debating Society a stimulating new dimension. As Mill says in the Autobiography, the Philosophic Radicals in the society now found themselves facing adversaries “of far greater intrinsic worth” than the Tories “with whom we had hitherto been combating.”32 Maurice and Sterling, John Mill observed, “were of considerable use to my development.”33 They “made their appearance in the [London Debating] Society as a second liberal and even Radical party, on totally different grounds from Benthamism and vehemently opposed to it; bringing into these discussions the general doctrines and modes of thought of the European reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century.”34 Mill saw Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the chief representative of this “reaction in England”; Coleridge’s thought had profoundly influenced Maurice and Sterling. They were probably introduced to Coleridge’s work by Julius Charles Hare, then a young Cambridge don and Sterling’s tutor at Trinity College. In 1818 Coleridge brought out a three-volume revised edition of The Friend. This collection of writings, originally composed for a periodical of the same title produced in 1809–10, included a piece of considerable length entitled “Essay on the Principles of Method.” The central question explored by Coleridge in this largely new essay was what it meant to be an educated man. A passage toward the close of the essay resonated powerfully with a number of young men who later became part of early- and mid-Victorian England’s “learned” classes. Coleridge referred to the “many examples . . . of young men the most anxiously and expensively be-schoolmastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any thing but educated; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength, and courage; varnished rather than polished; perilously over-civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated!” This condition stemmed “from inattention to the method dictated by nature herself, to the simple truth, that as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and living knowledge proceed from within; that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused or impressed.”35 This message imbued Hare’s guidance of the Cambridge undergraduates he took under his wing. Hare greatly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, both of whom he counted among his friends; he brought Maurice and Sterling into Coleridge’s company.36 Hare, according to his modern

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biographer, “reserved his worst venom for Jeremy Bentham and his followers.”37 Maurice and Sterling vigorously and ably fought the Benthamites in battles sponsored by the London Debating Society. Mill was especially drawn to Sterling. The two joined in a defense of Wordsworth in a debate of January 1829. The proposition contested in the debate, “That Wordsworth was a greater poet than Byron,” divided Mill from Roebuck—an enthusiast for Byron’s poetry—and made allies of Mill and Sterling. Sterling opened the debate, with what Henry Cole described in his diary as “a long and rambling speech.” He was answered by Roebuck, who, in “a most excellent speech,” put forward “a good case for Byron.” Mill proved Roebuck’s most formidable foe in a speech that lasted two hours. Cole considered it “a most excellent essay”; Sterling thought it “admirable,” and “infinitely better” than his own effort. Only in conversation with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Maurice had Sterling ever “seen or heard anything like the same quantity of acute & profound poetical criticism.”38 Sterling also could not have missed the personal turn Mill gave to his appreciation of Wordsworth’s merits. I have learned from Wordsworth that it is possible by dwelling on certain ideas to keep up a constant freshness in the emotions which objects excite and which else they would cease to excite as we grew older—to connect cheerful and joyous states of mind with almost every object, to make every thing speak to us of our own enjoyments or those of other sentient beings, and to multiply ourselves as it were in the enjoyments of other creatures: to make the good parts of human nature afford us more pleasure than the bad parts afford us pain—and to rid ourselves entirely of all feelings of hatred or scorn for our fellow creatures.39 Decades later Mill remarked that in the wake of this debate Sterling confided that he had mistakenly regarded Mill as a “manufactured man.” His discovery “that Wordsworth, and all which this name implies, ‘belonged’ to me as much as to him and his friends” had transformed his estimate of Mill.40 Mill would come to feel a keen affection for Sterling. A man of immense natural charm, endearing amiability, great sincerity, and high moral rectitude, Sterling evoked powerful feelings of attachment from those privileged to be his friends. Mill cherished his memory long after Sterling’s death from consumption in 1844. Hare would compose a memoir, and Carlyle, who developed a robust fondness for Sterling in the years after Mill brought the two together, wrote a warm and admiring

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biography. Carlyle characterized this work as “a light portrait, the truest I could easily sketch, of an unimportant but very beautiful, pathetic and rather significant, human life in our century.”41 A passage from Mill’s Autobiography recalls Sterling’s genius for friendship. He was indeed one of the most loveable of men. His frank, cordial, affectionate and expansive character; a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and ardent nature which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as well as I did.42 Sterling’s fine nature fastened upon Mill’s sensibilities at a time when the latter was particularly receptive to new influences.43 * * * In the second half of the 1820s John Mill showed a readiness to investigate the currents of European thought that he identified with the “reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century.” The chief defect of Enlightenment thought, Mill reckoned, was its negativity. Although they possessed the invaluable merit of forcefully exposing the intolerance, superstition, prejudice, and falsehood that riddled the institutions and belief systems of the old order, the leading thinkers of the eighteenth century failed to understand the conditions shaping the rise of those institutions and systems of belief, or the essential role these had played in civilizing Europe. Nor had the best minds of the eighteenth century offered anything positive in place of what they aimed to destroy. They did not grasp “that when all the noxious weeds were once rooted out, the soil would stand in any need of tillage.”44 In contrast, “the Germano-Coleridgian school,” which Mill saw as spearheading the reaction against the thought of the eighteenth century, “were the first who inquired systematically into the inductive laws of the existence and growth of human society.”45 His encounter with this school helped convince Mill that “the great danger to mankind is not from seeing what is not, but from overlooking what is.”46 The impact of Maurice and Sterling presumably had something to do with Mill’s “deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of

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Goethe and other German authors” in the latter half of the 1820s.47 Steeped in German literature and philosophy, Coleridge, in the words of his modern biographer, “championed the new German criticism and idealist philosophy, adapted it and developed it in an English context, and successfully made it part of the Romantic movement.”48 Unlike Coleridge, Mill never immersed himself in German thought and certainly never espoused the cause of German idealism. Learn German he did, in the mid-1820s, when he and a few of his friends “formed a class” to accomplish this end.49 This pursuit, however, did not presage a systematic and sustained engagement with major German thinkers. Mill had but a superficial acquaintance with the thought of Immanuel Kant, the greatest German philosopher of the late eighteenth century, and a man whose work stood in an ambiguous relation to the main currents of the Enlightenment.50 The same can be said of his familiarity with such German critics of the Enlightenment and Kantian rationalism as Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jabobi, and Johann Georg Hamann. And what little Mill knew of Germany’s early-nineteenthcentury “philosophers of feeling,” such as Franz von Baader, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Jean Paul Richter, he mainly got from the writings of Coleridge and from a couple of early essays by Carlyle.51 At no point did the specifically Germanic content of Coleridge’s thought prove especially palatable to Mill. Lack of evidence precludes a precise rendering of the nature and extent of Coleridge’s influence on Mill before the end of the 1820s. Mill’s publishing output in the late 1820s was meager, and the little he produced ignored Coleridge. The Autobiography offers scant help. In a section that sums up his state of mind respecting political institutions and principles circa 1830 he says: “The influences of European, that is to say, Continental, thought, and especially those of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They came from various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to read with interest even before the change in my opinions . . .”52 The first reference to Coleridge in Mill’s extant correspondence, in a letter to Sterling, does not appear until October 1831.53 We do know from a speech he delivered in the London Debating Society in spring 1828 that Mill then already regarded Coleridge as one “of the wisest men of all political and religious opinions.”54 Mill’s Collected Works include many references to Coleridge’s poetry. Although these do not predate 1830, he surely must have been reading Coleridge as well as Wordsworth in the years immediately following the onset of his mental crisis. For the lifting of spirits, Wordsworth’s poetry no doubt

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suited better than Coleridge’s; as a poet whose verse fused imaginative power and intense feeling, Coleridge the artist nonetheless stood high in Mill’s estimation, and played some part in the latter’s affective education. It was as a political philosopher rather than as a poet that Coleridge influenced Mill’s thinking. Conceptual changes in Mill’s view of political institutions and precepts make up the context for his point about having read “the writings of Coleridge . . . with interest.” Of Coleridge’s prose works, the two cited most often by Mill are the Second Lay Sermon and On the Constitution of the Church and State, the texts encompassing the central ideas of Coleridge’s mature thought on politics and society. Two editions of the latter work carry a publication date of 1830, although the first appeared in December 1829.55 When Mill invoked Coleridge as an example of political wisdom in his debating speech of 1828, he most probably had in mind the Second Lay Sermon, first published in 1817. The Second Lay Sermon embodied Coleridge’s response to the severe hardships afflicting the English masses in 1817. Dramatic cuts in government expenditure, the demobilization of the armed forces, high bread prices arising from a series of poor harvests, wage reductions, rising levels of unemployment and underemployment, and extremely rapid population growth combined to produce widespread distress. The discontent of the masses was expressed in the form of food riots, rick burning, and protest meetings. In the Second Lay Sermon Coleridge argued that the principal cause of the disordered state of English society was an excess of the commercial spirit. While acknowledging that commerce was an indispensable progressive force, Coleridge maintained that its spirit could not be allowed to dominate the social order. Selfish ends necessarily informed the pursuit of wealth, and these ends had to be balanced by forces identified with a sense of responsibility to the community. When functioning properly, the State itself, together with the agricultural order—whose leading members held most of the fixed personal property of the nation—incarnated values that promoted the durable interests of the wider society. Coleridge specified the ends they were to serve. “1. To make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual. 2. To secure to each of its members THE HOPE of bettering his own condition or that of his children. 3. The development of those faculties which are essential to his Humanity, i.e. to his rational and moral Being.”56 In Coleridge’s judgment, these ends were not being met. Dismayed by the conduct of the government and the policies it had put forward, and disturbed by the unfeeling treatment shown tenants and agricultural laborers by the country’s landlords, he attributed

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these regrettable developments to the commercial spirit’s overspilling its legitimate bounds.57 By the time he came to write On the Constitution of the Church and State, Coleridge had decided that neither the government nor the leaders of landed society had the ability to fulfill the purposes set forth in his Second Lay Sermon. The “clerisy,” as conceived by Coleridge, should have that ability. Coleridge regarded the Church of England as a National Church whose property was set apart for the use of national purposes. Its duty was to apply the resources it possessed to the education of the nation. This endeavor must go beyond the provision of rudimentary instruction. The education the clerisy imparted to the members of the community must be “grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious developement of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens.”58 Coleridge presented his idea of the National Church, and admitted that the condition of the actual Church of England in 1830 fell well short of realizing this idea. John Mill found much to admire in Coleridge’s conception of what the National Church and the clerisy ought to be. Mill read On the Constitution of the Church and State sometime before mid-autumn 1831. In a letter to Sterling dated 20 October 1831, he observed: “I certainly think it desirable . . . that there should be a national clergy or clerisy, like that of which Coleridge traces the outline, in his work on Church & State.” Most of those who made up the clergy of the Church of England, he added, were unfit to discharge the functions of Coleridge’s clerisy. Mill told Sterling that he believed Coleridge would agree with him (Mill) “in thinking that a national clergy ought to be so constituted as to include all who are capable of producing a beneficial effect on their age & country as teachers of the knowledge which fits people to perform their duties & exercise their rights, and as exhorters to the right performance & exercise of them.”59 Many of these capable individuals would not be members of the Church of England; some would not even be Christians. No manner of Christian himself, Mill certainly aspired to produce “a beneficial effect” on his “age & country.” Coleridge’s clerisy would exercise “the authority of the instructed,” an authority that Mill was given to thinking a lot about during these years. Another man giving it a lot of thought at this time was John Austin. In 1826 Austin was appointed Professor of Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations at the University of London, a new and undenominational institution of higher learning that James Mill had helped found.60 Students were not expected to enroll in courses before 1828, and in 1827 the Austins left for Bonn, which offered an attractive setting, a low cost of

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living, and a university boasting five professors of jurisprudence. Here John Austin would study and prepare his lectures.61 John Mill noted that this sojourn in Bonn “made a very perceptible change” in Austin’s “views of life.” He responded sympathetically to “the influences of German literature and of the German character and state of society.” These observations appear in a section of the Autobiography that treats the late 1820s and early 1830s. Mill returns to Austin in this section because he, of “the persons of intellect whom I had known of old,” was “the one with whom I had now many points of agreement.” Like Mill himself, Austin’s “tastes,” colored by his German experience, had turned “towards the poetic and contemplative”; he now “attached much less importance than formerly to outward changes, unless accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward nature.”62 All this meshed well with Mill’s unfolding concern for internal culture, with his rejection in principle of sectarianism and dogmatism, with his growing affinity for Goethe’s ideal of “many-sidedness.” Moreover, Mill plainly shared Austin’s disdain for the selfishness, “meanness,” and small-mindedness so prevalent in English society.63 Although careful to distance himself from Austin’s “indifference” to the advance of democratic institutions, Mill joined Austin in believing “that the real security for good government” rested in an instructed people.64 Austin delivered his first set of lectures in the autumn of 1829 (illhealth prevented his performing this duty in 1828).65 John Mill attended these evening lectures (two each week), and compiled notes of what he heard. Some of the ideas Austin put forward would have an important bearing on Mill’s subsequent exploration of the problem of authority in an age of transition.66 In his third lecture, Austin urged that the systematic investigation of ethics subsumed “so spacious a field that none but the comparatively few, who study the science assiduously, can apply the principle [of utility] extensively to received or positive rules, and determine how far they accord with its genuine suggestions or dictates.”67 Austin and Coleridge differed on where to look for the ultimate source of moral truths; along with Mill himself, they were as one in seeing the need for “teachers of the knowledge which fits people to perform their duties & exercise their rights.” While Austin conceded that a perfect theory and practice in the province of ethics could not be had, he nonetheless held that major advances were attainable. A commitment to impartial and patient inquiry, coupled with the application of systematic investigative procedures, “would thoroughly dispel the obscurity by which the science is clouded, and would clear it from most of its uncertainties.”68 The diffusion of greater knowledge and experience

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among the masses, Austin observed, would render them evermore inclined to accept the tuition of those highly instructed persons responsible for inculcating a compact and consistent body of doctrine; the deference of the multitude would be rooted in their reasoned respect for “the comparatively few” who possessed a deep and comprehensive understanding of moral science. The state of things here envisaged by Austin appealed powerfully to Mill. The problem was finding the persons qualified to guide the masses as they should be guided. At the same time as he listened attentively to Austin, Mill came into contact with the Saint-Simonians, a school of thinkers who laid claim to the kind of authority Austin spoke of. Of noble birth, Claude-Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825) had renounced his title at the beginning of the French Revolution, for the first phases of which he showed some enthusiasm. Having survived the Terror, he served under the Directory. After giving up an active political life in the early years of the nineteenth century, he took up his pen in earnest and developed a body of social and political doctrine that would ultimately influence a number of important nineteenth-century thinkers. Especially noteworthy, in John Mill’s terms, was Saint-Simon’s notion of historical change. Advocates of social and political reform, Saint-Simon maintained, needed to understand the conditions governing such change. The destruction of obsolete institutions could be accomplished speedily enough, as the French Revolution had graphically demonstrated. The creation of durable and progressive institutions in their stead, on the other hand, required an astute analysis of the forces shaping historical development. Saint-Simon saw the collapse of the feudal order in Europe, and the transformations that followed, as bound up with conflicts between classes whose interests, attitudes, and aspirations were spawned by social, economic, and technological forces. The institutional order and belief system of medieval Europe had effectively expressed the organic stage of historical development that society had then reached. As shifts in the organization of economic production occurred in response to social, scientific, and technological change, medieval institutions and beliefs lost their social utility, and a critical stage of historical development began. A persistent erosion of the legitimacy of the old order eventually culminated in the era of the French Revolution. The dissolution of that order, however, had not yielded a new unity of purpose or the institutional framework essential to the achievement of a new organic state of society. Saint-Simon sought to furnish such a framework, the specifics of which Mill would find much less compelling than the conception of historical change in which SaintSimon’s practical recommendations were embedded.

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By the time of Saint-Simon’s death in 1825, his writings as a social philosopher had secured him a body of ardent disciples. One of these was Gustave d’Eichtal. The son of a wealthy banker, d’Eichtal was in his mid-twenties when he first met John Mill. In London to proselytize on behalf of the Saint-Simonian cause, he attended a gathering of the London Debating Society at the end of May 1828. Mill participated in the debate, and d’Eichtal, riveted by the intellectual force on display, resolved to win him over to Saint-Simonism.69 He began a vigorous correspondence with Mill, and supplied him with tracts that set forth Saint-Simonian doctrine. Among the latter was Auguste Comte’s Systéme de politique positive, published in 1824. Comte had become SaintSimon’s secretary in 1817, only to have an acrimonious falling out with the master some seven years later. Written before this breach, and avowedly Saint-Simonian in character, the work Comte brought out in 1824 came to Mill with d’Eichtal’s hearty endorsement. Mill’s response to the book, conveyed in a letter of October 1829, registers some of the effects of the changes set in motion by the crisis of the mid-1820s.70 At this time, Mill’s admiration of Comte’s capacity for expounding a system of thought did not extend to the method by which he arrived at his conclusions or to the content of the conclusions themselves. “M. Comte is an exceedingly clear and methodical writer, most agreeable in stile, and concatenates so well, that one is apt to mistake the perfect coherence and logical consistency of his system, for truth.” Comte did not seem to grasp that the truths of politics and social science, unlike those of mathematics, could not be properly deduced “from a set of axioms & definitions.” The method embraced by Comte necessarily produced an emphatically one-sided and incomplete account of what government and society were about. The “fundamental principle” of Comte’s “whole system,” Mill stated, is “that government and the social union exist for the purpose of concentrating and directing all the forces of society to some one end.” Mill took strong exception to this notion, proclaiming that “Government exists for all purposes whatever that are for man’s good: and the highest & most important of these purposes is the improvement of man himself as a moral and intelligent being, which is an end not included in M. Comte’s category at all.” Contending that it was neither possible nor desirable that one end alone should be pursued by the “united forces of society,” Mill insisted that men “do not come into the world to fulfil one single end, and there is no single end which if fulfilled even in the most complete manner would make them happy.” When Mill turned to consider Comte’s candidates for the “one single end,” he found them unworthy of the precedence Comte assigned

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them. For Comte, the choice was between “the dominion of man over man, which is conquest, or the dominion of man over nature, which is production.” Mill noted that Comte attributed the former end to the ancient world (Mill rejected this attribution) and the latter to the modern age. Had Comte witnessed at first-hand the consequences for English society of its attaching excessive importance to “production”— a preference that “lies at the root of all our worst vices, corrupts the measures of statesmen, the doctrines of philosophers & hardens the minds of our people so as to make it almost hopeless to inspire them with any elevation either of intellect or soul”—he might have drawn back from such a hazardous proposition. Mill also demurred from Comte’s assertion that one law of development held sway over the course of civilization. Invoking England and France as examples of advanced civilizations, Mill observed that these two societies had followed different paths, and suggested that “neither of them has, nor probably ever will, pass through the state which the other is in.” The faculties of man, he urged, were not subject to a uniform order of development, their formation displaying a variety as great “as the situations in which he is placed.” Mill conceded that Comte’s book contained “many excellent & new remarks”; when properly modified and corrected, these could prove “very valuable.” It also contained a lot that was unsatisfactory. The followers of Saint-Simon should be alert to the work’s inadequacies, and not treat its doctrines as articles of faith. If they acted as a dogmatic sect, he cautioned d’Eichtal, “they will not only do no good but I fear immense mischief.” They should instead heed a dictum that Mill had recently adopted: “Substituting one fragment of the truth for another is not what is wanted, but combining them together so as to obtain as large a portion as possible of the whole.”71 In a letter written a month later, Mill sought to clarify his assessment of “the Saint Simon school” by dilating upon what he approved and admired in its project. During the interval Mill had received several letters from d’Eichtal, for whom he had come to feel a genuine fondness. He did not want d’Eichtal to think that his efforts to gain Mill’s sympathy and support had been fruitless, and worried that his previous “letter may have left an impression on your mind, that I do not think so highly of them [the Saint-Simonians] as I actually do.” Mill proceeded to identify two distinguishing marks of Saint-Simonian thought that he considered of outstanding importance, the first being a fundamental belief in “the necessity of a Pouvoir Spirituel.”72 Comte, in articles printed in the Saint-Simonian periodical Le Producteur in 1825–26, had stipulated the need for an organized hierarchy of intellectual leaders, supported by

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the state, who would act to disseminate knowledge and regulate opinion within the wider society. Such a coterie would be indispensable for sustaining a cohesive new social order in the wake of the dissolution of the old.73 The Saint-Simonians posited, in Mill’s words, the achievement of “a state in which the body of the people, i.e. the uninstructed, shall entertain the same feelings of deference & submission to the authority of the instructed, in morals and politics, as they at present do in the physical sciences.” In principle, Mill did not doubt that such was “the only wholesome state of the human mind.” The rub lay in the absence of a qualified group of instructors, and in the presence of powerful sinister interests determined to prevent the formation of such an intellectual influence. These formidable hurdles aside, Mill had grave reservations about the means advocated by the Saint-Simonians “for organizing the pouvoir spirituel.” Indeed, he submitted that “you cannot organize it at all. What is the pouvoir spirituel but the insensible influence of mind over mind? The instruments of this are private communication, the pulpit, & the press.” How were the instructed to be selected? Who was qualified to do the choosing? The Saint-Simonians could offer no mode of institutionalizing the authority of the instructed that was consistent with their premises. All the same, Mill awarded them high marks for grasping the importance of the end. The second distinctive contribution of the Saint-Simonians, Mill said, concerned the prominence they gave the connection between institutions and “a particular stage in the progress of the human mind.” Certain institutions, considered independently of the conditions in which they developed and functioned, might seem woefully ill-suited for serving the cause of improvement. Only by taking such conditions into account can one properly estimate their value. When viewed in this light, these institutions might be found “the only means by which the human mind could have been brought forward to an ulterior stage of improvement” (the Catholic Church in the Early and High Middle Ages being a case in point). Essential for a candid assessment of the past, this perspective was also needed for an understanding of the present. The Saint-Simonian system encouraged a healthy “eclecticism” and “comprehensive liberality,” a spirit of inquiry that labored against the baneful tendency to search for error in men’s opinions when the object should be to open their eyes to that portion of the truth they had not yet perceived. (When discussing Saint-Simonism in this letter, Mill made no specific mention of Comte’s work.) “The great instrument of improvement in men, is to supply them with the other half of the truth, one side of which only they have ever seen: to turn round to them the white side of the shield, of which they

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seeing only the black side, have cut other men’s throats & risked their own to prove that the shield is black.” A further virtue of the SaintSimonian system, one directly associated with its awareness of the relation between institutions and stages of development, pertained to “the investigation of political truths.” The Saint-Simonians rightly acknowledged the need “to ascertain what is the state into which, in the natural order of the advancement of civilisation the nation in question will next come; in order that it may be the grand object of our endeavours, to facilitate the transition to this state.” The practical calculations and conclusions issuing from this method and purpose revealed that the way forward was usually anything but straight. Mill observed: “it will often follow, that we must uphold or even establish institutions which are liable to produce great evils, evils which in other states of society might be without alloy; provided that these institutions have, at the same time, a tendency to counteract other mischievous tendencies, which happen to be more prevailing or more to be apprehended in that age.” For Mill, however, it was the state of the “nation in question” rather than the state of the human mind at large that had to be examined, and he reiterated his belief “that different nations, indeed different minds, may & do advance to improvement by different roads; that nations, & men, nearly in an equally advanced stage of civilization, may yet be very different in character, & that changes may take place in a man or a nation, which are neither steps forward or backward, but steps to one side.”74 (In these years Mill might have thought that a few of his own steps were to one side, or the other.) Mill’s further reading of Le Prodecteur, coupled with additional letters from d’Eichtal, had persuaded him that Saint-Simonian doctrine was still evolving, and that some of his initial objections had not been wellfounded. Yet he discouraged his friend from holding out the prospect of a conversion that would give rise to Mill’s active participation in the movement. Even if he became “convinced that the whole body of your doctrine is true,” he still would not become a propagator of the creed. Mill explained why. “It appears to me utterly hopeless and chimerical to suppose that the regeneration of mankind can ever be wrought by means of working on their opinion.” The societies of England and France would have to advance far beyond their current states before the teachings of Saint-Simonism, or any other comprehensive system of progressive thought, could obtain the results d’Eichtal and his colleagues looked for. Mill contended that the “adoption of St. Simonism, if that doctrine be true, will be the result and effect of a high state of moral and intellectual culture previously received.” To present it to minds wholly unfit to fathom or practice its fundamental tenets would be futile.75

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For England, certainly, Mill recommended a very different approach, one always mindful of the inability of his countrymen to understand or act upon any large lump of coherent doctrine. “Englishmen habitually distrust the most obvious truths, if the person who advances them is suspected of having any general views.” How does a person holding such views manage to reach the audience he sought to influence? By homing in on discrete practical points, which, when pleasingly presented, could cumulatively help “form their habits of thought.” One must first secure a “high reputation with them for knowledge of facts, & skill and judgment in the appreciation of details”; when this had been achieved one could “then venture on enlarged views; but even then, very cautiously and guardedly.”76 To promulgate a new doctrine, and then embark on a concerted drive to propagate its cardinal points, would accomplish nothing. Mill assured d’Eichtal that his refusal to enlist in the Saint-Simonian cause did not mean that his loyalties lay elsewhere. This refusal rather signified Mill’s opposition to putting himself “in the situation of an advocate for or against a cause.” Advocacy was inseparable from controversy, and Mill said he wanted no part of “argumentation and debate.” The habit of mind he wanted to cultivate required constructive engagement with a wide range of ideas. Far more could be gained by the gathering of truths than by the annihilation of errors. “I am averse to any mode of eradicating error, but by establishing and inculcating (when that is practicable) the opposite truth; a truth of some kind inconsistent with that moral or intellectual state of mind from which the errors arise. It is only thus that we can at once maintain the good that already exists, and produce more.”77 Mill’s unwillingness to consider taking up the cause of Saint-Simonism was in this way presented as the particular expression of a general attitude. Mill was here talking to himself as much as he was addressing d’Eichtal. This series of letters reveals his arduous struggle to adhere to the dialectic outlined above. Mill understood that he had a potent affinity with the critical spirit that he ascribed to the eighteenth century. His training had run with the grain of his mental powers and given him a formidable arsenal with which to engage in controversy. That he relished the use of this arsenal was evident not only in the articles he wrote during the mid-1820s but in his London Debating Society speeches of the late 1820s. In a debate of spring 1829 Mill and Sterling clashed fiercely when the latter inveighed against the immorality of Bentham and those who upheld his views within the London Debating Society. Mill reacted in a savage rejoinder that personally wounded Sterling.78

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Sterling then left the debating society, and Mill worried that his attack on Sterling might have made a casualty of himself.79 A fortnight after their verbal combat, he wrote to Sterling. I was unwilling that you should leave the London Debating Society without my telling you how much I should regret that circumstance if it were to deprive me of the chance not only of retaining such portion as I already possess, but of acquiring a still greater portion of your intimacy—which I value highly for this reason among others, that it appears to me peculiarly adapted to the wants of my own mind; since I know no person who possesses more, of what I have not, than yourself, nor is this inconsistent with my believing you to be deficient in some of the very things which I have.80 In part, Mill was determined to cultivate his friendship with Sterling for reasons not unlike those that moved him to assimilate “the reaction against the eighteenth century.” Prone, in these years, to take stock of “the wants” of his “own mind,” he acted to answer one of those wants. In another particular expression of the general attitude he had imparted to d’Eichtal, Mill himself withdrew from the London Debating Society at the end of 1829. * * * “I . . . am persuaded that discussion, as discussion, seldom did any good.”81 So John Mill had told d’Eichtal. Not much discussion passed between Mill and his father in the late 1820s; still less “argumentation and debate.” From his “father’s tone of thought and feeling, I now felt myself at a great distance,” he notes in his Autobiography.82 Neither the motive nor the content of John Mill’s program of internal culture could elicit James Mill’s understanding or support. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sterling, the Saint-Simonians—such men had nothing to say to James Mill, and he had nothing to say to them. For his wife and children, not being spoken to by James Mill was perhaps a source of relief. Bain’s generally sympathetic biography says of him: “In his advancing years, as often happens, he courted the affection of the younger children, but their love to him was never wholly unmingled with fear, for, even in his most amiable moods, he was not to be trifled with. His entering the room where the family was assembled was observed by strangers to operate as an immediate damper.”83 His eldest son could not muster the courage for a candid reckoning of the differences that had grown up

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between them. “On those matters of opinion on which we differed, we talked little.”84 A visitor to the Mill household in these years observed that John’s manner with his father “was deferential, never venturing to controvert him in argument nor taking a prominent part in the conversation in his presence.”85 No reckoning, in any case, could restore an emotional confidence and trust that had never existed. “I expected no good, but only pain to both of us, from discussing our differences”; yet the younger Mill wanted readers of his Autobiography to know that he did not stand mute when his father “gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine, in a manner which would have made it disingenuousness on my part to remain silent.”86 Maintaining a modicum of self-respect demanded no less, and required no more. Whatever we make of this faint claim of assertiveness, James Mill no doubt sensed that a wall now separated his eldest son from him. He could not know why it had sprung up, or of what materials it was made. The estrangement had more to do with feeling than with thought. In the region of elemental emotions John Mill found his father odious; the younger Mill’s “opinions” on most political and philosophical subjects nonetheless had a lot in common with those of the elder. Mill’s Autobiography, when discussing his intellectual development in these years, hints that he was striking out on a path of his own making, entering terrain his father had not trod. He sums up key changes in his thought, and attributes them to the new influences he had absorbed during the second half of the 1820s, influences he associated with “Continental” thought and “the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth.”87 He embraced the idea that “all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions”; another was that “any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress; and this is the same thing with a philosophy of history.”88 Were such ideas disputed by James Mill? In his History of British India he stated: “No scheme of government can happily conduce to the ends of government, unless it is adapted to the state of the people for whose use it is intended.”89 Was James Mill’s magnum opus innocent of a “theory of human progress”? In a letter written to his great friend Ricardo just months before the publication of The History of British India, he observed: “The subject afforded an opportunity of laying open the principles and laws of the social order in almost all its more remarkable states, from the most rude to the most perfect with which we are yet acquainted.”90 Did the author of the following passage, found in James Mill’s History, suppose that his work had no

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“philosophy of history” of the sort alluded to by John Mill in his Autobiography? It is not easy to describe the characteristics of the different stages of social progress. It is not from one feature, or from two, that a just conclusion can be drawn. In these it sometimes happens that nations resemble which are placed at stages considerably remote. It is from a joint view of all the great circumstances taken together, that their progress can be ascertained; and it is from an accurate comparison, grounded on these general views, that a scale of civilization can be formed, in which the relative position of nations may be accurately marked.91 The idea of sequential stages in the historical development of civilization had a significant presence in the work of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, central figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. In many respects a child of this Enlightenment, James Mill readily accepted the idea, to which he early exposed his eldest son. By the time he was seven years of age, John Mill had already read Millar’s An Historical View of the English Government, a book “highly valued” by his father.92 When John Mill examined “the spirit of the age” in 1831, he essentially grafted the Saint-Simonian notion of alternating “organic” and “critical” periods onto a preexisting Scottish scheme of historical understanding. Like the Saint-Simonians, Austin, and Coleridge, James Mill attached great weight to the influence of the instructed. He held that “In every society there are superior spirits, capable of seizing the best ideas of their times, and if they are not opposed by circumstances, of accelerating the progress of the community to which they belong.”93 James Mill adopted as his own the mission of advancing the progress of the community to which he belonged, and tried to work with others of like mind to bring this about. Moreover, he had educated his eldest son so as to prepare him for a leading part in the political and moral reformation of English society. This son would certainly have granted his father a place among those “capable of producing a beneficial effect on their age & country as teachers of the knowledge which fits people to perform their duties & exercise their rights, and as exhorters to the right performance & exercise of them.”94 Coleridge, Austin, and the Saint-Simonians, whatever the distinctive cast each gave the fundamental question of intellectual authority and its social influence, adhered to the basic premise asserted by James Mill concerning the vital importance of “superior spirits.”

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James Mill’s most withering critic in the late 1820s was not someone John Mill would have linked with “the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth.” In the mid-1820s James Mill brought out a volume consisting of essays he had originally written for the Encyclopædia Britannica.95 Standing first was his Essay on Government, initially published in 1820. Received by John Mill and his fellow Benthamites “as a masterpiece of political wisdom,”96 the Essay was seen by its author and his political disciples as “a concise and clear exposition of the Elements of Political Knowledge.”97 How to obtain the best security for beneficial legislation was the chief problem examined in the Essay. James Mill argued, in typically Benthamite fashion, that the answer could be deduced from a universal attribute of human nature: the pursuit of individual self-interest. Power in the hands of a minority would inevitably be used to profit those composing the privileged group, who would oppress the majority to satisfy their own selfish ends. It could not be otherwise in a world where “every man, who has not all the objects of his desire, has inducement to take them from any man who is weaker than himself.”98 To prevent such abuses, and secure legislation beneficial to the community as a whole, a system of representation had to be devised that gave effectual political expression to the aggregate of individual interests present within the community. The members of the representative body must be chosen in such a way as to identify the interests of those responsible for making public policy with the interests of the community at large. An extensive suffrage and frequent elections were the instruments necessary for accomplishing this essential end. James Mill conceded that a suffrage less than universal could attain this goal. Women could be excluded, their interests being subsumed by those of their fathers or husbands; so too could men under the age of forty, on the grounds that their interests substantially overlapped with those of similarly situated men above that age.99 Frequent elections were indispensable to binding the interests of the representatives to those of the electors. The premises and conclusions of the Essay on Government came under fierce assault in 1829, when T.B. Macaulay moved to detonate James Mill’s “Utilitarian Logic” in the pages of the Edinburgh Review. The ensuing debris would cause John Mill to question the adequacy of his father’s mode of political reasoning. The leading luminary among the younger set of Edinburgh Reviewers, Macaulay had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday when he set his sights on the redoubtable James Mill. Although not personally well-acquainted with the elder Mill, Macaulay did know some of the junior members of the Utilitarian circle. Like many others, he had felt

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Charles Austin’s influence at Cambridge, both men declaiming brilliantly in the debates of the Cambridge Union. Macaulay’s sister Hannah noted that Austin had successfully steered her brother toward more liberal views during their years at university.100 In the late 1820s Macaulay was one of several recent Cambridge graduates recruited by John Mill for the fortnightly meetings of the London Debating Society. Roebuck and Mill were frequent speakers, and Macaulay’s exposure to their political views amplified his awareness of James Mill’s influence. Macaulay’s extraordinary intellectual and oratorical abilities had been evident in childhood, not least to himself, and his supreme confidence in his powers of thought and expression seemed apt to those who witnessed his performances at the Cambridge Union.101 Physically unprepossessing, mentally he was a torrential force. Relative youth proved no bar to Macaulay’s joining issue with James Mill in 1829. In fact Macaulay did not wait until 1829 to assail the politics of James Mill and his acolytes. Two years before, in an essay for the Edinburgh Review, he had voiced his keen anxieties regarding the presence, within the “middling orders,” of “a Republican sect, as audacious, as paradoxical, as little inclined to respect antiquity, as enthusiastically attached to its ends, as unscrupulous in the choice of its means, as the French Jacobins themselves,—but far superior to the French Jacobins in acuteness and information—in caution, in patience, in resolution.” The members of this sect, he continued, were contemptuous of the “merely ornamental,” and had an antipathy to the fine arts, graceful literature, and the “sentiments of chivalry.” Their intellectual presumption had “made them arrogant, intolerant, and impatient of superiority.”102 In this article Macaulay did not put a name to the sect he had in mind or identify its leaders; any doubt on this score, however, was removed by his 1829 article on James Mill, which attributed precisely these qualities to the Utilitarians, and in much the same language.103 Macaulay’s alarm over the conduct of the Utilitarians stemmed in part from his sense of the social and political order they sought to radicalize. He saw this order as perilously unstable. The history of England since Waterloo, he declared in the essay of 1827, “is almost entirely made up of the struggles of the lower orders against the government, and of the efforts of the government to keep them down.”104 The years after the return of “peace” had been tumultuous. Appalling hardship had given rise to widespread disturbances that in turn prompted government crackdowns. In 1817 Lord Liverpool’s administration introduced, and Parliament enacted, temporary legislation suspending habeas corpus. Further Coercion Acts, including measures authorizing magistrates in

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disturbed districts to search for arms and to forbid the holding of mass meetings, were passed in 1819 in the wake of the so-called Peterloo Massacre. (On 16 August an attempt by local yeomanry to break up a huge reform demonstration at St. Peter’s Field outside Manchester had left some dozen people dead and hundreds more seriously injured.) In 1820 came the mass demonstrations in support of the new king’s longestranged wife Caroline, who had returned from the Continent to lay claim to her place as queen, a claim George IV could not abide. The admonition Macaulay gleaned from this last episode underscored his concerns about the trouble-making potential of the Utilitarians: On that occasion, the majority of the middling orders joined with the mob. The effect of the union was irresistible. The Ministers and the Parliament stood aghast; the bill of pains and penalties [against Caroline] was dropped; and a convulsion, which seemed inevitable, was averted. But the events of that year ought to impress one lesson on the mind of every public man,—that an alliance between the disaffected multitude and a large portion of the middling orders, is one with which no government can venture to cope, without imminent danger to the constitution.105 Macaulay viewed the Utilitarians as the vanguard of such an alliance, the formation of which he hoped to see thwarted. Only prudent and judicious reform, the sort favored by the Whigs, could preserve the balance of the constitution. So Macaulay believed. The events that occasioned his essay of 1827 flowed from the recent stroke that had disabled Lord Liverpool, the Tory premier since 1812. For some years Liverpool had skillfully—and not without great strain— held together a ministry hampered by deep personal distrust and by absence of consensus on the issue of whether or not Catholics should be allowed to sit in the House of Commons. George Canning, Liverpool’s foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons, headed a wing of the cabinet that supported Catholic emancipation. Also in the government were enemies of both Canning and the Catholic cause. Liverpool, generally a friend to Canning, lined up with Canning’s opponents on the Catholic question, and through his personal influence and authority he had managed to keep the government afloat. With Liverpool incapacitated, Canning succeeded to the premiership. Some of his former colleagues refused to serve under him, and Canning therefore had to seek Whig participation in his government. In a move endorsed by Macaulay and the Edinburgh Review, a handful of Whigs

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accepted office.106 The only alternative to such a coalition, Macaulay argued, was a reactionary Tory administration, “ignorant and tyrannical.” Should this come to pass, the radical principles of the Utilitarians “would spread as rapidly as those of the Puritans formerly spread, in spite of their offensive peculiarities. The public, disgusted with the blind adherence of its rulers to ancient abuses, would be reconciled to the most startling novelties.”107 It may seem odd that Macaulay should speak of the Utilitarians and the French Jacobins in the same breath, and also suggest that the main difference between them lay in the greater cunning of the former. For Jacobinism, of any stripe, James Mill had as little use as Macaulay. Although he was ready to exploit the fear of violent revolution within the governing classes to further the cause of reform, the coming of such an event would have made him shudder.108 James Mill saw thoroughgoing legal and political reform, mingled with mass education, as the pivotal forces for bringing about significant human improvement. The less thoroughgoing approach of the Whigs did not prevent him from doing his utmost to assist the passage of bills for parliamentary reform introduced by Lord Grey’s government in 1831 and 1832. Macaulay would be one of the most eloquent defenders of these measures, and the argument he then made for the enfranchisement of the middle classes sat comfortably with much of the case put forward by James Mill in his Essay on Government. Henry Brougham, the Whig politician and fellow Edinburgh Reviewer with whom Macaulay most closely identified in the late 1820s, worked in harness with his friend James Mill in support of the British and Foreign School Society, the infant school movement, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and the University of London.109 To the creation of that nonsectarian university Macaulay gave a hearty and celebratory welcome in the pages of the Edinburgh Review.110 In the years before James Mill made his name as the author of The History of British India, his occasional articles for the Edinburgh Review brought in some badly needed income. Macvey Napier, the man who originally commissioned James Mill’s essays for the Encyclopædia Britannica, later succeeded Francis Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review. These encyclopædia essays, to be sure, were solicited before the launching in 1824 of the Westminster Review, whose earliest numbers featured scorching attacks on the Edinburgh Review. The first of these was written by James Mill, the second by his eldest son under the father’s supervision.111 The thesis they proposed rejected as mythical the notion that the British Constitution struck a balance among the monarchy,

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aristocracy, and people; in practice, governmental power resided in the aristocracy alone. Parliament, the law, the church—all were political instruments designed to perpetuate aristocratic domination. The two parties, Tory and Whig, were simply two factions of the oligarchy, each of them determined to shield and succor the sinister interests of the Few against the legitimate interests of the Many. Whereas the Tories scarcely bothered to conceal their blatant bias, the Whigs tried to present themselves as the friends of the people and the balanced constitution. This ambition led them to ride a political “see-saw,” one that on critical issues routinely tilted in favor of the aristocracy. To demonstrate the validity of this contention, the Mills canvassed a wide range of essays printed in the Edinburgh Review, the chief periodical organ of the Whigs. They claimed to show that the conduct of the Edinburgh, from its inception to the present, amply exhibited the working of the “see-saw” and the unmistakable refusal of the Whigs to come to grips with the real abuses of aristocratic government. “What can be more immoral than the see-saw? A practice which is, throughout, a mere sacrifice of truth to convenience: a practice which habituates its votaries to play fast and loose with opinions—to lay down one, and take up another, with every change of audience?”112 The readiness of leading Whigs to join forces with Canning in 1827, and of the Edinburgh Review to justify this course of action, conformed well enough to this interpretive scheme. Yet the Whigs and the Edinburgh understandably deemed these charges unfair and offensive. Their purpose, as they conceived it, was to defend constitutional liberty and the cause of prudent reform against the toxic threats of both despotism and democracy. The Utilitarians should not have been surprised when the Edinburgh retaliated. What they could not have foreseen was the potency of Macaulay’s assault on the foundations of their political reasoning. According to Macaulay, the author of the Essay on Government showed no interest in testing his sweeping premises against the experience of governments that had actually existed. James Mill began with a set of assumptions about certain predilections inherent in human nature, “and from these premises the whole science of Politics is synthetically deduced!”113 Such a method might assist James Mill in reaching the conclusions he wished to arrive at, but neither the assumptions nor the conclusions did anything to explain the variegated motives from which conduct in the real world springs. The self-interest principle, treated by Mill as a law regulating political phenomena, had neither explanatory nor predictive value. It signified only that “men, if they can, will do as they choose.” The actions of a man reveal something about what he conceives his interest to be; what we may think of as his interest cannot

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be relied upon to tell us what his actions will be. “One man goes without a dinner, that he may add a shilling to a hundred thousand pounds: another runs in debt to give balls and masquerades. One man cuts his father’s throat to get possession of his old clothes: another hazards his own life to save that of an enemy. One man volunteers on a forlorn hope: another is drummed out of a regiment for cowardice.”114 Furthermore, James Mill’s idea that the interests of women could be safely entrusted to their fathers or husbands could not be squared with either a large portion of human experience or with the dictum that the desire to exploit others in the service of our own pleasure was embedded in human nature. On James Mill’s own premises, would not a democratic suffrage produce a plundering of the rich by the poor? And on what grounds could it be assumed that power lodged in the hands of the middle classes would be used for less selfish ends than power lodged in the hands of any other group? James Mill’s speculative method could not yield “just conclusions,” which could only be reached by induction, the method used “in every experimental science” to augment “the power and knowledge of our species.” Nothing of value could emerge from an attempt to build a science of politics on so-called laws of human nature. Conversely, much good could come from “observing the present state of the world”; “assiduously studying the history of past ages”; “sifting the evidence of facts”; “carefully combining and contrasting those which are authentic”; “generalizing with judgment and diffidence”; “perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts”; “correcting, or altogether abandoning it, according as those new facts prove to be partially or fundamentally sound.”115 In his Autobiography J.S. Mill discusses the impact of Macaulay’s attack on his own view of his father’s manner of political reasoning. The theory of government propounded by Bentham and James Mill had of course come under fire before Macaulay’s essay appeared; John Mill noted that his own part in defending this theory, together with his recent discovery of quite different “schools of political thinking,” had already disposed him to think Utilitarian doctrine imperfect. Without concluding that James Mill’s theory of politics was unsound, he had decided that corrections were needed in “applying the theory to practice.” Macaulay’s sortie, however, struck at the foundations of the theory, and several of his criticisms hit the mark: James Mill’s premises, his son acknowledged, “were really too narrow, and included but a small number of the general truths, on which, in politics, the important consequences depend.” Good government could not be achieved simply through aligning the interest of the representative body with that of the community, and

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electoral provisions in themselves could not ensure such an identity of interest.116 John Mill considered his father’s response to Macaulay’s animadversions far from satisfactory. James Mill should have answered that his critic had mistaken “an argument for parliamentary reform” for “a scientific treatise on politics.” (Surely James Mill saw his Essay as both these things, and presented his general reform proposals as the practical corollaries of the science whose rudimentary principles he had stated. He would have scoffed at the idea of giving such an answer as his son would have had him give. Presumably John Mill did not offer his father advice on this matter, or any other.) How did his father react? “He treated Macaulay’s argument as simply irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that when reason is against a man, a man will be against reason.” This retort unsettled John Mill, causing him to “think that there was really something more fundamentally erroneous in my father’s conception of philosophical Method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed there was.”117 Macaulay’s attack came at a time when John Mill was inclined to probe for weaknesses in his father’s way of thinking. Weaknesses he found, but they hardly persuaded him that Macaulay had got right what his father had got wrong. James Mill’s premises being deficient in scope and plenitude did not mean that one could contrive to do without premises altogether. Macaulay’s crude brand of induction, which called for an exclusively empirical treatment of political phenomena, was fundamentally misconceived. The plurality and complexity of the causes and effects characteristic of such phenomena rendered the experimental method proposed by Macaulay of no use whatsoever. Indeed, in his System of Logic John Mill scornfully rejected the mode of proceeding urged by Macaulay (he no doubt had the latter in mind when expressing this scorn): “The vulgar notion, that the safe methods on political subjects are those of Baconian induction—that the true guide is not general reasoning, but specific experience—will one day be quoted as among the most unequivocal marks of a low state of the speculative faculties in any age in which it is accredited.”118 Although the particular form of “general reasoning” applied by James Mill to political affairs was illadapted to the purpose, the science of politics had to be deductive. In his 1835 essay “Rationale of Representation,” John Mill asked: “If principles of politics cannot be founded, as Burke says, ‘on the nature of man,’ on what can they be founded? On history? But is there a single fact of history which can be interpreted but by means of principles drawn from human nature?”119

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Of course the epistemology of the Mills, father and son, posited that all knowledge, including knowledge of human nature, derived from “experience.” The formulation of sound abstract principles depended on “the accumulated results of experience.”120 The power of human observation, steadily and rigorously applied, gave rise to serviceable general theories. The younger Mill would argue that the science of politics must rest on approximate generalizations, a category of inductive truths from which probable inferences could be drawn. Unlike the universal truths of the physical sciences, these approximate generalizations could not be relied upon to account for every individual instance of a given phenomenon. The science of politics, however, dealt with the actions of mass communities rather than with those of single individuals. The person seeking to understand and influence such actions could “get on well enough with approximate generalizations on human nature, since what is true approximately of all individuals is true absolutely of all masses.”121 James Mill deduced too much from too few approximate generalizations, an error less serious than that made by Macaulay, who discarded generalization entirely in the mistaken belief that empiricism alone could furnish a safe guide to practice. It should be noted that John Mill’s caveats regarding his father’s theoretical stance produced no separation in the realm of practical politics. Macaulay and John Mill both understood that James Mill had one eye, maybe two, on English politics and society when he wrote the Essay on Government. Relative to England, John Mill was persuaded that his father’s suppositions and policy recommendations were authoritative. He states in the Autobiography that on practical political questions he and his father “were almost always in strong agreement.”122 John Mill remained “a radical and democrat, for Europe, and especially for England.”123 The truths gathered by Mill in these years did not undermine the fundamentals of his practical political creed, a creed delivered to him by his father. * * * As the 1820s drew to a close, John Mill, for all his advantages, had somber thoughts regarding his prospects for personal happiness. Writing to Sterling in April 1829, he alluded to “the comparative loneliness of my probable future lot.” This sense of loneliness, he explained, did not arise from “misanthropy” or a sense of social isolation. “At present I believe that my sympathies with society, which were never strong, are, on the whole, stronger than they ever were.” The lack he felt so keenly at this

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time, one he feared would not be made good, originated in his conviction of superiority. “There is now no human being (with whom I can associate on terms of equality) who acknowledges a common object with me, or with whom I can cooperate even in any practical undertaking without the feeling, that I am only using a man whose purposes are different, as an instrument for the furtherance of my own.”124 Eyton Tooke, a dear friend of John Mill’s since the early 1820s, apparently was not someone with whom Mill could “associate on terms of equality.” In his letter to Sterling, Mill implied that he had outgrown Benthamite doctrine and left behind the coterie of young men, Tooke included, whose comradeship had stemmed from belief in a common cause. Near the end of January 1830 Eyton Tooke committed suicide. Mill’s reaction, as evinced in a letter to d’Eichtal written a fortnight after “the horrible event,” was that of someone whose feelings were difficult to distinguish from the thoughts he had about his feelings.125 He acknowledged that he had been “deprived . . . of one whom I had counted upon as a friend and companion through my whole life.” Even so, he assured d’Eichtal that the blow, although acutely felt, had not made him utterly desolate. “Many who knew him and loved him less than I did, have felt the immediate shock much more forcibly.” Mill went on to explain that his grief made up in “durability” for what it lacked in “intensity” (an odd observation given the relative proximity of the terrible deed?). “I feel it most in enervation, & almost extinction, for the present, of all my activity, and all my concern for mankind or for my duties. It seems to me as if I had never cared for any one but him, and had never laboured but for his sympathy and approbation.” Yet Mill apprehended the transitory nature of this disposition. “I know this effect of it will not last. The more affectionate I cherish his memory, the more ardently shall I pursue those great objects in which he took so deep an interest.” Mill then introduced the theme he had brought forward in his letter to Sterling: the significance he attached to the experience of fellowship in a common cause. “I should care little for life or for mankind, but for the thought that there are among them a few men like him [Tooke], & that all have in them the capacity of becoming at least an approximation of what he was. There are yet two or three living, but for whom I should no longer value existence.” He conceded that “scarcely any” of these two or three “were equal to Eyton and none superior to him in purity and singleness of mind combined with warmth and kindliness of affection, yet I cannot entirely droop or relax in my exertions while they survive, and remain unchanged towards me, and progressively improving in the developement of their intellectual and

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moral capabilities.”126 Mill’s letter to d’Eichtal underscored the inestimable importance to him of strong friendship and the great worth he had placed upon his bond with Eyton Tooke. It also intimated that the grave loss he had suffered would not imperil his own existence. The tribute paid Eyton Tooke in the Autobiography—“a young man of singular worth both moral and intellectual”—fittingly summed up Mill’s judgment of Tooke’s moral qualities, without revealing his true opinion of Tooke’s intellectual abilities.127 Mill’s letter to d’Eichtal had cited Tooke’s “purity and singleness of mind combined with warmth and kindliness of affection”—laudable traits, no doubt, but not the stuff of intellectual distinction. Less than a month after writing to d’Eichtal, Mill raised the matter of Eyton Tooke’s death in a letter to the eminent French political economist J.B. Say, whose guest the young John Mill had been at the start and end of his stay in France in 1820–21. After expressing his condolences to Say upon the recent death of Madame Say, John Mill feelingly noted his own bereavement. I have myself suffered a most grievous and unexpected loss, by the death of my poor friend Eyton Tooke, who was well-known to you as one of the most excellent and promising of all his contemporaries, and who would have been a blessing to his country and to his kind. The loss of such a man will be felt in a thousand ways by persons who never knew him nor were aware what things were to be expected from him if he had lived to pursue the career of selfimprovement and philanthropic exertion which he had entered upon; and how admirable a moral influence he would have exercised on all with whom he came in contact, by the unrivalled purity and rectitude of his purposes, combined with the largest and most comprehensive liberality and philanthropy.128 Had Mill thought Eyton Tooke’s intellectual power proportionate to his moral standing, he would have said so in his letter to Say. Tooke’s limitations were explicitly acknowledged in a letter Mill wrote John Pringle Nichol in December 1834. Nichol, a young astronomer with a vigorous interest in political economy, was evidently on the mend after a bout of serious illness and depression. Mill noted: “I once lost a most valued friend, one of the most valued I ever had—though not to be compared with you in intellect—in consequence of a similar disease— the eldest son of Tooke, the political economist.”129 Tooke’s uncommon virtue had not been enough to put him on the elevated plane occupied by John Mill.

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Ultimately John Mill would choose to believe that one person in his life ranked not only as his equal but as his superior. He met this person in the same year Eyton Tooke died. Whether or not Harriet Taylor added to or subtracted from the advantages John Mill enjoyed in the late 1820s is a question he would have thought absurd when he came to write his Autobiography. For some time after 1830, however, the question remained open.

CHAPTER

THREE

Mill and Harriet Taylor: The Early Years

When John Mill entered the orbit of Harriet Taylor he was twenty-four years of age, and she seventeen months his junior. He was a young man whose extraordinary intellectual gifts had already been acknowledged in certain circles; she was part of a circle whose most prominent member, William Johnson Fox, appreciated the worth of John Mill’s gifts and the varied use to which they could be put. A charismatic Unitarian preacher and impassioned political radical, Fox was pastor of the South Place congregation in Finsbury. He also edited the Monthly Repository, the periodical organ of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association. Unitarianism and Utilitarianism, movements integral to the English Enlightenment, shared a powerful commitment to the causes of civil equality, religious liberty, free inquiry, educational reform, and general human improvement. Unitarian and Benthamite circles conspicuously overlapped. Both John Bowring and Henry Southern, coeditors of Bentham’s Westminster Review, were Unitarians. When the first issue of the Westminster Review appeared in January 1824, the author of its opening article was none other than W.J. Fox. When Jeremy Bentham died in June 1832, his funeral oration was delivered by Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith, quondam Unitarian minister and a man still closely associated with Fox.1 A common Unitarian upbringing underlay the marriage of John and Sarah Austin. The world of respectable London radicalism familiar to the young John Mill incorporated prominent strains of Unitarianism and Utilitarianism. There was nothing especially odd in his being invited to dine at the home of John Taylor and his young wife Harriet, two of W.J. Fox’s most valued congregants.

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A prosperous wholesale druggist in a well-established firm based in the City of London, John Taylor was a man of notable liberality, a stalwart supporter of W.J. Fox and the South Place Chapel, and a generous friend to political refugees from the Continent who had made their way to London. He had wed Harriet Hardy in 1826, when he was nearly thirty years of age and she just eighteen. She had grown up in Walworth, south London, where her father practiced as a surgeon and “manmidwife.” Her mother, née Harriet Hurst, came from a family that proudly claimed descent from Cavalier stock. Tense relations with her parents and many of her siblings (she had five brothers and one sister) may have predisposed her to accept a matrimonial proposal from a man of abundant good nature and ample means. It is not hard to account for John Taylor’s interest in making such a proposal. A daughter of W.J. Fox vividly recalled the aura cast by Harriet Taylor when the latter was in her mid-twenties (a portrait, evidently painted when Harriet Taylor was approximately this age, corroborates the word-picture). Mrs. Taylor at this date, when she was, perhaps about five and twenty years of age, was possessed of a beauty and grace quite unique of their kind. Tall and slight, with a slightly drooping figure, the movements of undulating grace. A small head, a swanlike throat, and a complexion like a pearl. Large dark eyes, not soft or sleepy, but with a look of quiet command in them. A low sweet voice with very distinct utterance emphasized the effect of her engrossing personality.2 The first years of the marriage seem to have brought happiness to both parties. Their first child, a son (Herbert), was born in 1827. A letter Harriet wrote to her husband in July 1828, when she was visiting family on the Isle of Wight, was all that a loving husband could hope for. “Do not imagine my dearest that I ever doubted that your wish for our uniting was as great as mine. I knew that my dear husband loves me, as I have loved him, with my whole heart . . . I think from my present feelings that I shall never again consent to our parting.”3 In fact, she did consent to another parting, and fairly soon after. In the summer of 1829 Harriet Taylor, pregnant for the second time, was once more on the Isle of Wight, her husband having remained in London.4 Something about her marriage had begun to trouble Harriet Taylor, and she sought the counsel of Fox, her spiritual guide and a man whose radicalism included advocacy of equal rights for women. According to Alexander Bain, “Mrs. Taylor made Fox her confidant as to her want of

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sympathy from her husband . . . and Fox suggested her becoming acquainted with Mill.”5 Bain implied that his source was Harriet Martineau, who in the late 1820s and early 1830s wrote extensively for Fox’s Monthly Repository. She too was a guest at the dinner to which Mill and his friends Roebuck and Graham were invited, as was Fox himself. Martineau, an inveterate gossip, apparently had many more things to say regarding the circumstances, but Bain concluded that there could be “no good in repeating them.”6 What Bain understood the vague phrase “want of sympathy from her husband” to mean is not clear. No one has ever suggested that the cause of the problem lay in John Taylor’s want of feeling for his wife, or that the husband rather than the wife might have approached Fox about the state of the marriage. Harriet Taylor had an elevated opinion of herself, one she found frequently confirmed by the admiration she easily elicited. She wanted for herself a creative and purposeful life, one befitting a person of exceptional qualities. Her notion of what such a life should involve had no doubt changed in the years since she had wed John Taylor and become associated with Fox’s coterie, which included a number of talented young women whose aspirations and activities transcended the domestic sphere. An exceptional woman, she believed, could find true companionship only with an exceptional man. Before the end of 1830 she had concluded that John Taylor, for all his worthy qualities, could not rise to such a standard. By then she was again with child. Three pregnancies in less than five years had put paid to what little sexual ardor she might once have felt for her husband. His physical enthusiasm for his beautiful young wife, on the other hand, may well have continued robust. Even had a degree of compatibility been created and maintained in this sphere, it would not have kept Harriet Taylor from becoming disgruntled. She had a keen appetite for ideas, poetry, art, and music, and her affiliation with the Monthly Repository circle heightened this appetite. In feeling and in thought (the former especially), Harriet Taylor needed to soar. John Taylor, whom Thomas Carlyle described as “an obtuse most joyous-natured man, the pink of social hospitality,”7 could do many valuable things; soar he could not. What did Fox think might follow from bringing Harriet Taylor together with John Mill? One thing he probably hoped for related to his own aspirations. Harriet Taylor’s “engrossing personality” could help Fox snare Mill for the Monthly Repository, which Fox wanted to make less denominational and more literary and political. In serving himself, however, Fox had no trouble believing that he could also benefit others. John Mill and Harriet Taylor, he reckoned, would find one another’s

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company enjoyable and stimulating, and the growth of a friendship between the two would boost Harriet Taylor’s flagging spirits. Her marriage to John Taylor might be more easily endured if Mill’s attentions nourished her mind and emotions. Fox presumably understood that risk also attended the dinner to which John Mill and his friends were invited. Its presence did not deter Fox, whose views regarding the “sanctity” of marriage were unorthodox (in 1833 he would use the pages of the Monthly Repository to argue against the indissolubility of marriage).8 Indeed, Fox’s ambiguous personal circumstances in the early 1830s could well have figured in the gossip later dispensed by Harriet Martineau. Fox had married in 1820 (he was then in his mid-thirties). Two years later he experienced a total breakdown, and for a time he could not preach. If marital strain did not cause this collapse, it contributed to the severity of his illness.9 Fox gradually recovered his health, but his personal affairs took on a further complication after the Foxes were introduced to Benjamin Flower—a radical printer, editor, and writer—and his two exceptionally gifted and exquisitely beautiful daughters, Eliza and Sarah. (Eliza would achieve a measure of distinction as a composer; Sarah as a poet, a writer of hymns, and an actress. They apparently inspired the creation of the Ibbotson sisters in Harriet Martineau’s 1839 novel Deerbrook.) Benjamin Flower’s wife had died in 1810, when Eliza was seven and Sarah five, and he took charge of their education. This education did not include much in the way of disciplined instruction; it did, however, allow for the unimpeded flow of his daughters’ impressive natural endowments. Benjamin Flower had Unitarian connections, and a reputation as a fearless radical (in 1799 he had been sent to prison for six months for his alleged libel of an Anglican bishop). In 1820 he and his daughters moved to Dalston, near Hackney, and in the years that followed all three were drawn increasingly into the London milieu of radical Unitarianism. After 1823 they became notable members of the South Place Chapel circle. Benjamin Flower and W.J. Fox cultivated a warm friendship. When Flower died in 1829 his daughters joined the household of the unhappily married Fox, who had been named their trustee. Eliza Flower became many things to William Fox—editorial assistant, amanuensis, daily companion, and more. They loved one another, and the love was not that of father and daughter. Mrs. Fox, not without good reason, came to feel that Eliza Flower had usurped the place that rightfully belonged to her. The daily personal, social, political, and intellectual world of W.J. Fox scarcely made room for the marginalized Mrs. Fox, the mother of his three children. Eliza Flower had a central place in that world. Harriet

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Taylor had struck up a great friendship with Eliza Flower sometime before the dinner in 1830 that brought John Mill and his two friends to the Taylors’ Finsbury residence in Christopher Street.10 Whatever Fox knew of Harriet Taylor’s marital situation, Eliza Flower also knew. Both would want to promote the happiness of their dear friend. To John Taylor’s interests they probably did not give a lot of thought. Their circumstances, and their sympathies, would not lead them to worry unduly about the threat to those interests that John Mill’s entry into the Taylor household might represent. Mill, of course, did not see himself as threatening anyone’s interests when he accepted the Taylors’ invitation to dine. His connection with Fox at that juncture was more political than personal, and even the political connection had not been unusually close. There is no reason to think that Fox told him in advance that he was likely to find Mrs. Taylor’s company more bracing than Mr. Taylor’s. She was armed with intelligence supplied by Fox: John Mill was brilliant, cultivated, high-minded, and sympathetic. Provided he did not disappoint on first acquaintance, Mill’s favor and admiration would be worth having. Harriet Taylor’s power to captivate should not be underestimated. She possessed elegant beauty, an abundant self-confidence, a vigorous intellect, and a ready wit. Her very manner of being imparted a distinctive force. After meeting Harriet Taylor for the first time, in the summer of 1834, Thomas Carlyle enthused (in a letter to his brother John): “she is a living romance-heroine, of the clearest insight, of the royallest volition; very interesting, of questionable destiny, not above twenty-five: Jane [Carlyle’s wife] is to go and pass a day with her soon . . . being greatly taken with her.”11 The young John Mill was ripe for an awakening of the heart, and Harriet Taylor had the means to arouse in him feelings such as he had never before known.12 Or had he? Mill, in the Autobiography, refers to the “small circle of friends” with whom Harriet Taylor was on familiar terms at the time they met. Of these friends, only one “was a person of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her own.”13 Mill does not name this person (“long since deceased”), but the obvious candidate is Eliza Flower, Harriet Taylor’s most cherished friend (before Mill himself came along). Mill “reviewed” several of Flower’s musical compositions for the Examiner in the early 1830s. The following passage, from a review of her Songs of the Seasons (1832), typifies his lavish praise of the music and its composer. There is in every strain that which denotes it to be the work not merely of an accomplished musician, but of a mind penetrated with

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the spirit of a true artist . . . The language which Miss Flower has chosen is music, and she speaks it like one to whom none of its dialects is unfamiliar, because none of the feelings to which it is appropriate, from the loftiest to the most tender, is a stranger to her. When to these qualities of the inmost nature, is added originality of melody, together with adequate scientific knowledge of harmonic principles, we have all which constitutes musical genius, in the highest and most exclusive sense of the term.14 Friendship played a part in moving Mill to puff the creations of Eliza Flower; he felt he could do this, however, without abandoning sincerity. Her artistic power, as he saw it, had the imprint of genius. No contemporary documents point to a personal acquaintance between Mill and Eliza Flower before he came to know Harriet Taylor. In the 1890s Moncure Conway, whose ministry of South Place Chapel spanned most of the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century, brought out a book commemorating the centenary of South Place. In its pages he spoke of Eliza Flower: “John Stuart Mill was supposed at one time an aspirant for Eliza’s hand; but she was the spouse of her art, consecrated to its ideal.”15 Conway, born in Virginia in 1832, had never met Eliza Flower, who died of consumption in 1846. He revered Mill, with whom he became friendly during the last decade of Mill’s life.16 Even if Mill had at one time felt a romantic interest in Eliza Flower, it is most unlikely that he would have mentioned the matter to Moncure Conway. The story Conway reported in his history of South Place presumably existed as a sensational element in the congregation’s oral tradition. If credence be given this story, certain items in the established historical record can be used to contrive a different sort of narrative relative to the start of the friendship between Mill and Harriet Taylor. Eliza Flower’s rejection of a marriage offer might have precipitated Mill’s prophecy, confided to Sterling in April 1829, that his “probable future lot” would be one of “comparative loneliness.” Fox’s initiative in bringing Mill together with Harriet Taylor could have been influenced by his wish to take Mill’s mind off Eliza. Mill’s disposition to feel his heart swell when Harriet Taylor displayed an ardent interest in him could have been colored by his disappointment at the hands of Eliza Flower. An alternative chronology could place the dinner at the Taylors before a Millian approach to Eliza Flower. This gathering could then be seen as the occasion marking Mill’s introduction to the South Place circle, in which the Flower sisters held a prominent presence. Not a lot is known about the first two years of Mill’s association with Harriet Taylor, which might

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have developed into a serious relationship only after Mill had pursued Eliza Flower and been rebuffed. None of this, however, seems plausible. Had Mill proposed marriage to Eliza Flower before April 1829, his involvement with Fox’s group would have had to begin well before anything in the documentary record indicates was the case. Had Fox wanted to turn Mill’s thoughts away from Eliza Flower, would he not have tried to keep him at arm’s length rather than arrange a dinner at the home of her intimate friend Harriet Taylor? Moreover, it is hard to imagine that Harriet Taylor could have been kept uninformed of a marriage proposal issued by Mill to Eliza. Would she have considered Mill worthy of her love had he declared his devotion to another? Not likely. Moncure Conway’s report has all the earmarks of the apocryphal. The lore of South Place made much of Eliza Flower’s beauty and genius, and Conway would have heard a lot about her extraordinary qualities during his decades as its minister. Mill, dead some twenty years at the time Conway published his account, would have been remembered as a figure of towering eminence, and by then his admiration for Eliza Flower’s person and art would have been bandied about by several generations of South Place communicants. The parties directly involved circa 1830—Mill, the Flower sisters, Fox, the Taylors—had long since left the scene, and were apt to become the stuff of legend in a congregation such as South Place. The idea that Mill had at one time proposed to Eliza Flower could readily take hold of the imagination, and nothing more than embellished hearsay would be needed for such a notion to gain currency. Conway accepted its truth; we should not.17 Thomas Carlyle never linked Mill romantically with Eliza Flower. Harriet Martineau, with whom the Carlyles developed a friendship during the second half of the 1830s, would not have neglected to tell him of such a connection had one existed. To suppose that one existed, and that Martineau had not learned of it, does scant justice to her talent for acquiring piquant intelligence. Of the initial meeting of John Mill and Harriet Taylor she had first-hand knowledge, and Carlyle adapted Martineau’s description of the encounter for his own sardonic purposes directly following Mill’s death in 1873. Walking with Charles Eliot Norton, the American man of letters, Carlyle gave this account: [ John] Taylor was a verra respectable man, but his wife found him dull; she had dark, black, hard eyes, and an inquisitive nature, and was ponderin’ on many questions that worried her, and could get no answers to them, and that Unitarian clergyman you’ve heard of, William Fox by name, told her at last that there was a young

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philosopher of very remarkable quality, whom he thought just the man to deal with her case. And so Mill with great difficulty was brought to see her, and that man, who up to that time, had never looked a female creature, not even a cow, in the face, found himself opposite those great dark eyes, that were flashing unutterable things, while he was discoursing the utterable concernin’ all sorts o’ high topics.18 The imperatives of Carlylean caricature, coupled with the animosity he ultimately came to feel toward Harriet Taylor, moved Carlyle to emphasize Mill’s innocence and Taylor’s “great dark eyes . . . flashing unutterable things.” Harriet Taylor must have done some “discoursing” of her own, and Mill no doubt liked what he heard. (If he liked what he saw even more than what he heard, he would not have admitted this to himself.) Unlike Carlyle, Roebuck was present at the dinner given by the Taylors. He failed to notice anything unusual in “what passed that evening, but it turned out that Mrs. Taylor was much taken with Mill.”19 Like Carlyle, Roebuck assumed Mill knew nothing of women, his mother and sisters aside, before he met Harriet Taylor. Roebuck’s retrospective account, recorded many decades after 1830, intimated that Harriet Taylor’s response to Mill mattered far more than his response to her. We are led to suppose that if she was “taken” with him, and then acted on her feelings, he would succumb. Both Carlyle and Roebuck took it for granted that Taylor had far more say than Mill in what followed. Roebuck did not specify how much time elapsed before he “learned that an intimate acquaintance had arisen between Mill and Mrs. Taylor.” That one did arise in fairly short order seems clear. The initial phase of this acquaintance must have been launched by Harriet Taylor. One need not go all the way with Carlyle and Roebuck on the subject of Mill’s innocence to conclude that he could not have taken the lead. Control over the structure of the relationship, from start to finish, rested principally with Harriet Taylor, whose force of will Mill could not begin to answer. The earliest surviving documentation attesting to a romantic friendship between John Mill and Harriet Taylor inferentially derives from August 1832. A letter from Mill, written in French and bearing no date, refers to flowers Mill had gathered in the New Forest with Harriet Taylor in mind. Mill’s summer 1832 walking tour in Hampshire, Sussex, and the Isle of Wight culminated in the New Forest toward the end of the first week of August. Either upon his return, or shortly thereafter, he learned of Harriet Taylor’s decision to end their relationship. The

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communication that passed between them on this occasion was carried out through an intermediary, very probably Eliza Flower. Mill’s gallant reply delicately conveyed the heartache caused by this decision, while honorably acknowledging the duty it imposed upon him. At the same time, he would not fully embrace the idea that a conclusive break was taking place. Benie soit la main qui a tracé ces caractères! Elle m’a écrit—il suffit; bien que je ne me dissimule pas que c’est pour me dire un éternal adieu. Cette adieu, qu’elle ne croie pas que je l’accepte jamais. Sa route et la mienne sont séparées, elle l’a dit: mais elles peuvent, elles doivent, se rencontrer. A quelqu’époque, dans quelqu’endroit, que ce puisse être, elle me trouvera toujours ce que j’ai été, ce que je suis encore. Elle sera obéie: mes lettres n’iront plus troubler sa tranquillité, ou verser une goutte de plus dans la coupe de ses chagrins. Elle sera obéie, par les motifs qu’elle donne,—elle le serait quand meˆme elle se serait bornée à me communiquer ses volontés. Lui obéir est pour moi une nécessité. Elle ne refusera pas, j’espère, l’offrande de ces petites fleurs, que j’ai apportées pour elle du fond de la Nouvelle-Forêt. Donnez-les lui s’il le faut, de votre part.20 [Blessed be the hand which traced these characters! She writes to me—that is enough: although I do not pretend that it is not to say goodbye to me forever. She must not believe that I accept such a farewell. Her way and mine have separated, as she says. But they can, they ought to, meet again. At whatever time, in whatever place that may be so, she will find me always the same as I have been, as I am still. She shall be obeyed; no further letters of mine shall disturb her peace, or pour one extra drop into her cup of sorrows. She shall be obeyed, for the reasons which she gives,—she would have been, even if she had confined herself to telling me her wishes. To obey her is for me a necessity. She will not refuse, I trust, the offering of these little flowers, which I have brought for her from the depths of the New Forest. Give them to her, if necessary, as if they came from you.] Harriet Taylor did not want to give up Mill, and she was soon able to persuade herself that such a sacrifice could be avoided. Her attempted

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withdrawal had presumably arisen from John Taylor’s learning of her feelings for Mill. There is nothing to suggest that Harriet Taylor ever felt guilty about the feelings themselves. Her love for Mill, as she understood it, was pure and ennobling. Although she wondered whether the intensity of Mill’s emotional investment in the relationship matched her own, she knew that his love for her was untainted by base motives. She would not be unfaithful to her husband, and Mill would not want her to be. Still, she could see that she had hurt John Taylor, from whom it could not be concealed that his wife loved another better than she loved him. He was not only her husband but the father of her three young children. He had done all he could to make her happy. She had inadvertently caused him pain, and she had tried to repair the damage by breaking with Mill. The break did not last, for she had found that the pain of the severed lovers, perhaps one of them in particular, was more than they should have to bear, given the purity of their feelings, intentions, and actions. In October 1832 Mill spent a week walking in Cornwall. The Taylors, during the same month, toured North Wales by carriage. When the latter returned to London they moved from their Finsbury residence to a grander dwelling, 17 Kent Terrace, Regent’s Park. Mill was a frequent visitor, as can be seen from a letter he wrote Fox in May 1833. “I knew not that you were to be in K.T. on Wednesday, and I seldom go there without some special reasons on that day of the week, for as it cannot be right in present circumstances to be there every evening, none costs so little to give up as that in which there is a much shorter time and only in the presence of others.”21 What Mill thought the right number of evenings to be “in present circumstances” is not revealed; Fox, it seems, thought his chances of finding Mill at Kent Terrace on a Wednesday evening as good as on any other evening of the week. John Taylor was a highly obliging sort of husband. The craving John Mill and Harriet Taylor had for each other’s company was such that in June of the same year Mill could not stay away, though the evening in question happened to be a Wednesday. He reported to Fox: “As for me, I am going to K.T. today, despite its being Wednesday.”22 The meetings at Kent Terrace were not of a clandestine character. Did they sometimes seek other venues, ones that would permit a greater degree of intimacy than Kent Terrace could accommodate? Harriet Taylor wrote to John Mill, probably around this time (the letter is undated): “Yes dear I will meet you, in the chaise, some where between this and Southend—the hour will depend on what your note says to-morrow (that is supposing the chaise is to be had of which there is

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very little doubt.) . . . Bless thee—to-morrow will be delightful & I am looking to it as the very greatest treat.”23 Not all was above board, and the illicit element primed the adrenal glands. Such assignations also signaled the gap between the intimate world they sought to create for themselves and the conventions governing respectable society. The latter forbade sighs of love passing between a married woman and a man not her husband. John Mill and Harriet Taylor ruled out the possibility that any blame could be justly affixed to their conduct. The fault lay with the institution of marriage and the subjugation of women it enjoined. Fairly early in their relationship, probably soon after they had resumed seeing one another in late 1832 or early 1833, Harriet Taylor asked Mill to write down his thoughts on marriage and divorce.24 As the request came from “She to whom my life is devoted,” he naturally complied.25 Mill held advanced views on the subject of equality between the sexes before he met Harriet Taylor. In the Autobiography he notes that these opinions “were among the earliest results of the application of my mind to political subjects, and the strength with which I held them was, as I believe, more than anything else, the originating cause of the interest she [Harriet Taylor] felt in me.”26 Mill would have been reading Bentham when he first applied his “mind to political subjects.” Bentham maintained that the interests of women ought to count for no less than those of men in any just understanding of “the greatest happiness principle.” A passage from his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) would not have been out of place in J.S. Mill’s Subjection of Women: In certain nations, women, whether married or not, have been placed in a state of perpetual wardship: this has been evidently founded on the notion of decided inferiority in point of intellects on the part of the female sex, analogous to that which is the result of infancy or insanity on the part of the male. This is not the only instance in which tyranny has taken advantage of its own wrong, alleging as a reason for the domination it exercises, an imbecility, which, as far as it has been real, has been produced by the abuse of that very power which it is brought to justify.27 James Mill, to be sure, did not join Bentham in deprecating this injustice. Yet, alongside the elder Mill’s disdainful treatment of Mrs. Mill and his readiness to deny women the suffrage in the Essay on Government should be set his apparent expectation that the instruction John Mill gave

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his siblings should make no significant distinction between brothers and sisters.28 Moreover, James Mill let stand his son’s criticism of the Edinburgh Review’s canvassing of the “female character” when father and son went after the leading Whig quarterly in 1824. The brand of morality inculcated by the Edinburgh, the younger Mill noted, praised men for being energetic, independent, and self-sufficient. “In a woman, helplessness, both of mind and of body, is the most admired of attributes.” A man without courage was thought contemptible; a woman without courage was thought “amiable.” To be entirely dependant upon her husband for every pleasure, and for exemption from every pain; to feel secure, only when under his protection; to be incapable of forming any opinion, or of taking any resolution without his advice and aid; this is amiable, this is delicate, this is feminine: while all who infringe on any of the prerogatives which man thinks proper to reserve for himself; all who can or will be of any use, either to themselves or to the world, otherwise than as the slaves and drudges of their husbands, are called masculine, and other names intended to convey disapprobation. Even they who profess admiration for instructed women, not unfrequently select their own wives from among the ignorant and helpless.29 James Mill knew a number of well-instructed women—Sarah Austin, Harriet Grote, and Lady Bentham among them—for whom he may well have professed admiration. He had chosen as his wife a woman incapable of evoking his respect. Did his eldest son wittingly deliver an indirect rebuke to his father when offering this last observation on the foolishness of some enlightened men? His father had been foolish, but he was also enlightened enough to appreciate the good sense in what his son had to say on this subject. The youthful John Mill independently concluded that the law should not deny women the rights and opportunities it gave to men. He says in the Autobiography that he strongly dissented from James Mill’s contention “that women may consistently with good government, be excluded from the suffrage, because their interest is the same with men.” He apparently expressed this dissent to his father, who replied that he had not “intended to affirm that women should be excluded, any more than men under the age of forty.” These exclusions had formed part of a discussion that aimed to establish “the utmost limit of restriction” consistent with maintaining “the securities for good government.” James Mill

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had not argued that such restrictions ought to be applied. John Mill, along with his associates of the early 1820s (over whom he exercised considerable intellectual sway), granted that his father’s argument should be so understood. At the same time, they maintained (according to John Mill) that “the interest of women” was no more “included in that of men” than “the interest of subjects” was “included in that of kings.” They held “that every reason which exists for giving the suffrage to anybody, demands that it should not be withheld from women.” Bentham too entered the discussion, “wholly on our side.”30 We cannot know whether John Mill’s “strong convictions on the complete equality in all legal, political, social and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and women” were “the originating cause of the interest she [Harriet Taylor] felt” in him.31 They surely played a part. Such a straightforward characterization of these convictions might lead one to think that the issue of marriage and divorce would be swiftly and decisively dealt with by Mill in the essay he drafted at the urging of Harriet Taylor. Not so. Neither marriage nor divorce fared well in the essay. The “law of marriage as it now exists,” he declared, “has been made by sensualists, and for sensualists, and to bind sensualists.”32 Most men being voluptuaries, the indissolubility of marriage had long been advantageous to women. (Before 1857 divorce could only be secured through an Act of Parliament, a prohibitively expensive recourse for all but the most wealthy. Judicially authorized separations, which did not allow for remarriage, were the purview of the ecclesiastical courts.) The general run of men married to satisfy their taste for a particular woman. Once this appetite had been quenched, their natural inclination was to abandon the woman in question. The “irrevocable vow” they had taken countered this inclination by creating a permanent bond between man and woman. The mere fact of living together as husband and wife encouraged the husband to develop “some feeling of regard and attachment” for his spouse. Moreover, the wife gained what often mattered to her most—security against her children being taken from her. Most women sought in marriage a stable home and a respectable status. When these had been acquired, they wished to keep what they had. Mankind at large, at least as currently constituted, could not grasp what individuals of a higher nature readily understood: “the absurdity and immorality of a state of society and opinion in which a woman is at all dependent for her social position upon the fact of her being or not being married.”33 This dependence stemmed from the formative influences of education and custom. From the earliest age girls learned that they were meant to be wives and mothers, and that the

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functions they performed in these roles determined their usefulness to society. Responsibility for their material support was to rest with the male head of the household. “The indissolubility of marriage,” Mill observed, was “the keystone of woman’s present lot, and the whole comes down and must be reconstructed if that is removed.”34 The fundamental question, he then asserted, was “not what marriage ought to be, but . . . what woman ought to be.” Marriage between equals would be something very different from what marriage had been hitherto. Mill insisted that the progress of civilization had rendered ever less important the only natural inequality distinguishing the sexes, “bodily strength.” The obstacle to converting natural equality into social equality lay “in artificial feelings and prejudices.” A woman should not be dependent on a man by virtue of her being a woman, any more than a man should be dependent on a woman by virtue of his being a man. Legitimate dependence of one party on the other could arise, but only when spawned by the affections and when renewed perpetually “by free and spontaneous choice.” As matters stood, however, a woman’s position, “in nine cases out of ten, makes her either the plaything or slave of the man who feeds her; and in the tenth case, only his humble friend.”35 The emancipation of women from this position hinged on their receiving an education fit for the achievement of economic independence. Did Mill expect that most women would enter the labor market, once given the means to earn their livelihood? He did not think they would, or that they should. Doubling the number of people competing for employment would place tremendous burdens on an already crowded labor market. Here Mill seemed to be implying that few women were currently in paid employment—he knew, of course, that the laboring classes included a sizeable number of women who had to work for wages in order to survive. If matters were arranged to suit his wishes, the female portion of the labor force would in fact shrink. “In a healthy state of things, the husband would be able by his single exertions to earn all that is necessary for both; and there would be no need that the wife should take part in the mere providing of what is required to support life: it will be for the happiness of both that her occupation should rather be to adorn and beautify it.”36 Mill had no clue that his vision of womanhood had been infiltrated by “artificial feelings and prejudices.” His lofty and idealistic conception of woman’s chief vocation was firmly anchored in the culture of his age. “The great occupation of woman should be to beautify life: to cultivate, for her own sake and that of those who surround her, all her faculties of mind, soul, and body; all her powers of enjoyment, and powers of giving

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enjoyment; and to diffuse beauty, and elegance, and grace, everywhere.” If her nature were so active as to require employment beyond this “great occupation,” the world would not fail to provide it. Mill perhaps had a particular couple in mind when he noted how this unexhausted energy would “naturally” be put to use: If she loves [and how could it be otherwise for one who everywhere dispersed “beauty,” “elegance,” and “grace”], her natural impulse will be to associate her existence with him she loves, and to share his occupations; in which if he loves her (with that affection of equality which alone deserves to be called love) she will naturally take as strong an interest, and be as thoroughly conversant, as the most perfect confidence on his side can make her.37 A woman with a life such as this had fulfilled “the end of her existence.” Yet, even in a world where legal and social equality prevailed between the sexes, many women would be denied this ultimate fulfillment. The parents of girls had to ensure that their daughters had “the power of gaining their own livelihood.”38 Although there should be no distinction in the employments for which daughters and sons were to be fitted, nature could be relied upon to make its own distinction. Those occupations “which partake most of the beautiful, or which require delicacy and taste rather than muscular exertion, will naturally fall to the share of women: all branches of the fine arts in particular.”39 Having said this (and more), Mill was nearly ready to pronounce judgment on what the law of marriage should look like. A just law of marriage presupposed that women were free to stay unmarried, a freedom founded on their ability to support themselves. In such circumstances, those who chose to marry would not need to remain married for reasons of subsistence. In many instances, the dissolution of a marriage would increase the sum of happiness of the parties concerned, if only by lessening the sum of their unhappiness. A large number of marriages inevitably scored poorly on happiness: “the failures in marriage are such as are naturally incident to a first trial: the parties are inexperienced, and cannot judge. Nor does this evil seem to be remediable.”40 Allowing parents to decide who would be a fit spouse for their son or daughter could not answer this problem. The motives fathers and mothers had in promoting or discouraging a particular match could be far removed from the true interests of those who had the greatest stake in the outcome. Given the chances of a marriage turning out badly, strong grounds existed for permitting divorce.

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Those in favor of making divorce a readily available option nonetheless had to consider the negative effects of adopting this policy. If people could marry, divorce, and remarry with ease, they would have much less incentive to choose well in the first place. And Mill granted cogency to the position “that the first choice should be, even if not compulsorily, yet very generally, persevered in.”41 Serial “trials for happiness, and repeated failures,” he maintained, “have the most mischievous effect on all minds.”42 The blighting of hope engendered by such recurring disappointments would sow despair among those who aspired to a virtuous life. The effect of multiple matrimonial trials and errors on the more common stock of humanity would be a sinking into moral depravity. Mill, moreover, was persuaded that the interests of children tended to be far better served if the family stayed intact. Children, he stated, “are wholly dependent for their happiness and for excellence upon their parents.” In the vast majority of cases, that happiness and excellence “must be better cared for . . . if their parents remain together.”43 Mill also introduced a further consideration touching upon the issue of divorce: the gap between the immoderate expectation of happiness held by most people and their li